mean that digital devices won't be an important part of our lives for decades to come.

What it does means is that the PC, which has carried the digital revolution for 24 years, has matured into something boring -- a costly commodity already possessed by most of the households in the US that can afford one. And while it is being replaced, or complemented, by a new wave of cheaper and friendlier digital appliances, those devices still are in the development stage, so they can't take up the slack caused by the PC slump.

In other words, the digital world is in a transition, and there's no way to tell how long it'll last.There's a strong future on the other end of that transition, but it will be a bumpy ride getting there.

Of course, broader macroeconomic and psychological factors are also playing a major role in the current tech slump. The very fear of a slowdown or a recession, and the disappearance of easy gains in wealth in soaring stock markets, surely influence a family's decision that it doesn't need yet another $1,500 personal computer, ordered from the Dell Web site. And that decision hurts both PC sales and e-commerce.

Not only that, but the grotesque hype that has always been part of the PC and Internet industries, and which helped create the technology bubble in the first place, makes it as hard to judge the current slump as it did the earlier surge. Neither the PC nor the Internet, important as they are, was ever as fabulous or earth-shattering as their boosters claimed. And their current downturn isn't the end of digital innovation, either.

It has been four or five years since Microsoft or anybody else turned out a compelling software product that mainstream consumers were dying to use, and which required a faster or better PC. Almost no software has been written that requires a DVD drive, and speech-recognition software never caught on.

The killer apps of the past few years have been the Web browser, the e-mail programme and the instant-messaging module. And they don't need a Pentium 4, or even a Pentium III, to run. The most popular online software, America Online, is explicitly designed to run on modestly powered PCs. The only other applications that have stirred much recent interest -- simple editing of home photos and videos -- also didn't push the envelope much. You can produce a decent home movie on a $999 Apple iMac.

Indeed, both the Web and digital photography drove consumers to spend money on things other than PCs -- like high-speed Internet lines and digital cameras.

PCs are a lot cheaper than they were five years ago, but they cost about the same, or even a bit more, than they did last year. The PC isn't dead. Sales may even revive a bit next year, when Microsoft releases the consumer version of Windows 2000, code-named Whistler, which promises benefits that may make people want a new PC powerful enough to run it. But the PC has peaked as the sole device capable of doing digital things. It will gradually get repositioned as a tool mainly used by content creators, programmers and power users.

For everybody else, the next decade will bring an array of simpler digital devices -- wireless and wired, hand-held and deskbound -- to take over many popular functions now performed by PCs.