Death to the 'standard' PC: Let's scrap the beige box NOW

The humble office PC is no longer so humble. Once it was dumb; now, it's rather clever. Once, you got black-on-green; now, you have a cornucopia of colour available at the click of a mouse. They're quiter. More powerful. More efficient. Can handle multimedia. Wired to a world wide web of information.

So why is the standard machine in offices up and down the country a beige, utilitarian monstrosity with all the aesthetic appeal of a duck-billed platypus?

silicon.com heard an instructive anecdote recently, told by someone who used to work for a major server vendor. A few years ago, his employer came out with a product that had the same functionality of another machine on the market - but took up a fraction of the space.

He told us that he would regularly go into meetings with potential clients only to be shown the door. They'd look at what they had, then look at his slim-lined beauty - and swiftly eschewed the latter because they didn't believe it could do the job of its bloated cousin.

So it is with desktops. Apple bravely tried to buck the beige box trend with its slimmed-down, curvy iMac, which was launched in 1997. And how many corporates have that as a standard these days? QED.

But there are signs a change is on the way. This year, Apple, Gateway and Sony have all begun to market smallish desktops with built-in flat-panel monitors. Meanwhile, HP has continued to market its ePC, a small machine that can be paired with a flat-panel monitor. IBM earlier in the year killed off its NetVistaX, an all-in-one PC with an integrated flat-panel, but this month came out with the NetVista S42, a small desktop with an attachable flat-panel monitor.

And today, Dell has come out with a mini desktop for businesses (http://www.silicon.com/a56137 ).

So are these traditional PC giants any more likely to succeed than Apple with their lovely new designs? Not until the perceptions encountered by our anecdote-teller change - that, and price points.

One reason so few 'brave' designs have failed to take off is what's on the ticket: because they don't sell in huge numbers, they tend to be expensive. But the fact remains that they won't sell in huge numbers until those perceptions have changed, whatever the price.

(Let's not forget that these things are smaller than your average PC, and size does matter: less desk space used leads to less office space used leads to lower real estate costs in the long term leads to a happier CFO. So there's an economic argument too. But that's another story).

Talk to your average techie, and they'll say what matters most is what goes on under the bonnet. And fair enough.

But talk to your average end user, and you'll get a different answer. Most would far rather have a machine in front of them that brightens up the daily grind, not something that has come to symbolise it.

'Serious' IT folk are probably laughing at this. But why? What's wrong with making your users happy? They might even enoy logging on every morning. It's not all about functionality you know. Be brave. Think differently, as Apple might have said.