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TI CEO Says PC Era is Ending
FModnar writes "Texas Instruments CEO Tom Engibous is claiming that the PC era is ending. He claims that wireless Internet devices are replacing PCs as 'the driving force in the electronics industry' and will become even more popular once they are linked to broadband networks. Check out this story at Yahoo! News."
He doesn't really say the PC market will fade, but more that the wireless market will increase. This is true. As wireless high-speed communications increase in availability they will increase in popularity, because, face it, people will want such toys. PCs will hold on for some time yet because of things like full keyboards, mice and large monitors. Newer people from the older generation trying to learn computers will tend not toward wireless high-speed gizmos, but more toward the PC desktop market as a [relatively] easy to use method of computing. Personally, I don't think something like the palm-top with an airlan type connection would suit me, as I can not see taking a 3-6 inch monitor seriously... imagine slashdot on one of those?; }return(0);}
#include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1)
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I think that within 5 years it will be commonplace for any average home in the US to have one computer for all the high-end needs, and that members of the household will have personal, small, PDAs that they can use for their daily purposes, then interface with the home PC.
So I think the market will change a bit, but I doubt the PC will "go away."
And of course, I'm sure that coders and the like will still want personal Linux boxes hanging around.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Okay. I can understand why he might say that the PC era is ending. I mean, my Ti99/4a can hardly keep up anymore. We upgraded recently to a massive 10 megabyte hard disk and a 1200 baud modem. You should see slashdot on this thing. It's interesting to see how it remaps the character set to make the various icons like einstein and lady liberty that you "power users" of such computer as the Timex Sinclair take for granted.
However there are two things that my trusty Ti99/4a will have that these newfangled things (that connect to something called the global internet) will never have. First a giant box of a speech synthesizer. Who would think, a talking computer. Second a cassette tape adapter for me to load Tunnels of Doom. God bless technology.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
90% of the world doesn't have a PC now and the PC era is supposed to be ending? Right. I'll believe it when I see all those Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, etc. etc. etc. running Wordperfect on their cellphones.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
All this means is that the TI CEO thinks wireless internet devices or whatever are the "next big thing".
:)
Well, everyone is investing in all kinds of crazy stuff hoping it will be the next big thing. Feel free to make a generator for it, using the words "innovative", "wireless", "internet", "hand-held", "touch screen", "Open-Source", "integrated", "internet-ready", "small footprint", "network", "Java", "device", "organizer", etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. We'll all be sick of it soon enough.
Does that mean this will be the next big thing? They sure hope so. We'll see a lot of attempts, and most of them will fail. These devices have their place, and some of them will live on. Some of them might even replace cell phones and pagers, and let you check on your stuff when you're on the road. That's really handy.
But the PC will live on. PC's will always have more brute computational force, display your games prettier, give you more room to surf the web and chat with people, play your music, etc., etc. Technological advances from both sides will be folded together. I can't wait to have a PC with a nice big flat screen, and a few really efficient processors.
But I still wouldn't want to take it on the road, and it's still a PC, just as much as my old Tandy with the monochrome monitor and the full-sized keyboard. Heck, anyone who hasn't been keeping up would just know that PC's are more like TV's now, they're prettier and stuff. Outwardly, they look pretty similar. Screen, keyboard, CPU, etc. I don't think that's gonna change for a while.
Screw paradigm shifts, I'm staying right here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What if all those Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, etc skip the 'PC era?' From what I've read, wireless networks are taking the rest of the world by storm (places other then the US). For instance, I went on a tour in Ireland a while ago. Our tour guide was a telephone-line repairman (For Eircom, I think). It sounds like a shit job by US standards, but is a respectable job in Ireland. Anyway, their telephone networks are not all that great. Many areas on the island use some old radio system for their telephone communications.
The fact is that almost everybody I met had a cell phone, and nobody had a computer. The internet and email are things that would be of great use to the people. Small and portable web-devices would be much better suited for these people then desktop PCs.
I am not sure of the situation in the Asian countries, but I am sure smaller devices would suit a majority of the people much better.
It's not like they HAVE to own a desktop PC before they buy some smaller wireless-web type device.
The margin on a PC is tiny. It would be impossible for someone to enter the market and achive significant market share. Investors wouldn't support them, since they'd just lose money to the Dell's, Gateway's, and others who have:
None of these limitations apply in the portable/wireless Internet market. Any number of killer, high-margin products remain to be developed and sold. It's a new market, not a "mature" one. TI (and Motorola, and ...) are right to focus on it.
Desktop and portable PC's aren't going away any time soon--they still be made in the tens of millions for years to come. But that's not where money is to be made.
Is TI trying to pump up this new market with this sort of PR? Of course! And as well they should. Trying to start something new in the PC market would be a colossal waste of money.
When people start using anything other than a PC to access the web, I'll start believing that the age of the PC has come to an end.
WebTV and the Palm Pilot(which doesn't even espouse to replace your computer!) do not a new PC-era make. What are the churn rates on WebTV, incidentally?
The fact that "x86 compatible" was repeated around 30 times by Transmeta's Ditzel should be noted.
Yours Truly,
Dan "My Brain Is Not Yet x86 Compatible" Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
To say that the age of the PC is over is probably like saying that the age of TV ended in the late 80's or early 90's with the rise of the home PC. Of course, there are as many TV's as ever, but they no longer represent the defining technology of an era. How many people here hack their TV sets or digital cable boxes?
I think some people here may be frightened about obsolesence - after all this time developing mastery over a medium, and cultivating arrogance towards those who have failed to get it, could there be a little payback coming down the pike? (Many others, of course, I am sure will be quite able to translate existing expertise to deal with the new environment - I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with IPv6 myself.)
But I do think that the PC paradigm is inelegant. Cables and wires everywhere, big clunky boxes, etc. - from a design perspective and in terms of aesthetics, the whole thing could use a lot of improvement.
...it was on the sub-ether radio this morning it said your were dead..."
"Yeah, that's right. I just haven't stopped moving yet"
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
If it has a 19" screen, chances are it's not a PC, it's a workstation.
It's the middle-of-the-road, consumer PCs you find at Best Buy that we should be ushering out. These are the equivalent of a 1979 Malibu six-cylinder, too underpowered for its size, too big and gas-guzzling to be a daily driving car, but since it was the smallest and cheapest thing on the showroom floor, you drove it home. Consumers buy these midgrade or lowgrade $1000 machines basically because that's all Best Buy has.
Average users don't really like PCs (or Macs). They're big and bulky, they are FURNITURE (they take up a whole desk), they're slow (no other appliance in the house takes 2 minutes to start up), and they never really quite do what they want. They'd rather play video games and watch movies on the TV, do their checkbook at the kitchen table or on the desk in the bedroom (using some smaller portable unit), and sit in the easy chair to surf the Web.
The modern PC isn't that far removed from an old room-sized mainframe - the PC often expands to fill the room it's in. You can't bring it to you, you must go to it, which means it, its data, and all the media you see or hear on it must remain forever trapped in whichever room you put it - which in most households, is never the same room as the entertainment center. You pay the price for its flexibility by concentrating much of your activities in that room, at that desk.
Laptops aren't the answer for this - they're downscaled PCs, saddled with the additional limitations of battery life, tiny screens, sick keyboards, and high price tags. And they're the solution to the wrong problem - they take the PC on the road. I don't want to take a PC on the road, I want to take it to my easy chair.
Cell phones and PDAs aren't the answer either - they're small devices designed to do specific things, which by itself isn't the problem until you overdrive them by making them do too many things. Let them do what they are designed to do and do it well, and let larger devices - say, a 9x12 or 11x14 LCD "sketchpad" - start to absorb the role of the consumer PC (finances, Web surfing, etc).
Workstations are another matter entirely. Artists, programmers, and writers (and Slashdot readers) - and in general, people who focus on the COMPUTER (not merely the applications thereof, as in the consumer who buys a computer for what it will do for THEM) - are fine with a tower under a desk and a 21" piece of glass in front of their faces. And even then, what writer or artist wouldn't desperately love to practice their craft under a shade tree? Bjork composes most of her music these days walking the beach with a tiny (CD-player-sized) handheld sequencer and a pair of headphones. I'd trade the 21-inch monitor for the ability to code Perl on the beach, wouldn't you? Especially if I'm saving and testing my code via wireless on the tower at home.
The car analogy continues: use a truck (workstation) for big work, small efficient Hondas (wireless 11x14 pen-driven digital notepads) for day-to-day stuff (surfing the Web, doing the books sitting on the sofa), and motorcycles (handhelds) for when you want to feel the wind in your hair (writing Perl on the beach). The alternative is to continue as we have done, letting PC vendors do like Detroit auto makers and continue to build dinosaurs just because that's all they know how to make.
Therein lies the revolution.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard