A Silicon Valley company has hailed as a major landmark the production of their one billionth computer mouse.
Logitech's description comes at a time when analysts claim the days of the mouse are numbered.
"It's rare in human history that a billionth of anything has been shipped by one company," said Logitech's general manager Rory Dooley.
"Look at any other industry and it has never happened. This is a significant milestone," he told the BBC.
But sounding the death knell for the device is Gartner analyst Steve Prentice who said "the mouse will no longer be mainstream in three to five years." However he did acknowledge the manufacture of the one billionth mouse was a "tremendous achievement."
"It speaks volumes to the success of the mouse that they (Logitech) have produced a billion and good luck. But past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
"The world has changed and the nature of machines has changed. The multi-touch interface I believe really does seal the coffin of the mouse," added Mr Prentice.
Personally, I have two modern Logitech mice (one was bought just a few weeks ago for my laptop, and they really do lead the way in terms in build quality and innovation), and I know most IT professionals swear by Logitech, for a very good reason.
I don't think the mouse has only got until 2012 or so left, because quite simply, touchscreen is nice on a phone, but not so nice on a PC, who wants to need to clean their PC screen every 5 minutes, and who wants a cumbersome interface that may not even work so well, when a mouse does just about everything you need it to, and works perfect (perfection is something that takes decades, not years).
Touchscreen technology has been touted since the advent of tablet pc's in about 2001, and yet, still 99.9% of all new computer systems do not feature it? If people wanted, they can have it today, and it is not much more, if any in a lot of cases, expensive than traditional screens and software.
A lot of these predictions are based upon what Microsoft are developing for the future, and I have a feeling this is deeply related to the fact they will be pushing touchscreen in Vienna.
However, as we have seen during the past 2 years, since the release of Vista, the vast majority of user's are reluctant to change, and basically don't like it one bit. In addition to this, people are finally starting to realise that having a system that simply works, and is reliable and stable, is far far more important than having a fancy system that does allsorts of coold things, but struggles with the basics.
I think touchscreen will be more an additional tool to the conventional mouse, rather than a direct replacement, at least for the next decade or so. I would not be in the least bit surprised to see mice still being widely used come 2020.
Touchscreen works so well on phones, because there is limited space to intergrate a large screen and keyboard, if you want the phone to remain extremely small. It may help along the development of ultra-portable laptops and netbooks, but for home systems etc, I can't see there being that big an attraction.
Come to think about it, I can still imagine there will still be a lot of people using Windows XP in 2012, 11 years after it was released, if you compare this level of usage to Windows 3.1 and 95, 11 years after they were released, they were practically dead and unused platforms.
The industry still has a lot to learn about what consumers actually want/need imho.
BBC News Report
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