Screensavers, Success Story of a Total Transformation
Rare old school IT professionals still remember the practical value of early screensavers. The cradle of modern computers in early 1990 was also the cradle of early PC monitors.
The time humanity was spending behind of a computer screen has been skyrocketing since and it still is. The need for screensavers on those first truly personal computers was of a pure practical nature. They were a product of a pure necessity.
Late 80s computer monitors were, regarding the technology, like prehistoric visitors. PC screens that were left on for hours were subject to a danger of permanent damage. The letters on your screen got burned into the structure of the screen surface and stayed there for good. Regardless the fact that monitors quickly became a mass production product, there still were no cheap and reliable answers to that issue.
Monitor production companies could not provide any satisfactory breakthrough that would deal with that. A fantastic non-hardware product swiped away every monitor related worry of those days.
World first ever screensavers started their victorious siege. Black background and trivial graphic were the limits of early developers as the hardware and software did not allow anything near to what we can download today.
Those first windows operating systems still had to cope with monitors which development was staggering well behind what motherboards and computer chips were experiencing. That difference between technological progresses in software vs. hardware regarding PC monitors somehow helped screensavers to overgrow their initial purpose. Today there are no computer monitors that would suffer a phosphorus burn in even if you leave them on for days.
We can question ourselves if it makes sense to continue using screensavers while each personal computer today offers an option to turn off monitor automatically when inactive. Screensavers are the statement of individuality and they will stay in for a long time.
The competition among screensavers has become a fierce business on the web. The direct user experience has become the deciding factor. The monitor has become a personal garden, which you want to be displayed to others as well as making you feel better when enjoying it. From trivial graphic and programmable fonts to photo slideshows, animations and sound, screensavers seem to evolve in a completely new media.
Information highways are another reason why the screen saver evolution seems to be going on faster than ever. Animated screensavers are for example becoming more and more similar to a movie.
Turning back to a well known fact that each science evolves into several different scientific directions the evolution of screensavers is also likely to branch into at least 5 equally represented categories of screensavers.
Free animated screensavers, free funny screensavers, all those freebie searches on the web seem not to harm continuous investments in better, more interesting and even more interactive screensavers. We live in the society where all payable software solutions have their free alternatives. All it takes is to check the number of pages in yahoo for free screensavers.
Obviously there still is a niche for freeware in this field.
Funds for screensavers are provided by third party providers who develop their own free software and offer it to screensaver providers to include it into their screensaver installation package and are compensated for each download or for a specific action required from the final user of the screensaver. Whichever way the future of screensavers my take us; it seems the user will continue to enjoy free products for a long time to come.
For the time being the market of supply and demand for free screensavers is in balance and the ingenious financing scheme is ensuring some even more exciting products for the future.
About the Author
The quality of a screensaver is measured far more by end user experience than solely by animation and graphics. We should not be supprised to see in the future screensavers evolving from one-way media to two-way communication media. Feel the effects of funny free animated screensavers on your daily stress at work or at home.
Source: http://www.articopia.com