Slashdot Mirror
The Dawn of the Post-PC era?
An anonymous reader writes "The "Post-PC" era may be near at hand, according to the findings of a recently completed market study conducted by eTForecasts. The study projects that Windows CE-based devices may outsell Windows-based PCs within 5 years. According to the report, Microsoft has made "tremendous progress" in positioning its Windows CE and derivative operating systems for use in a broad range of handheld and mobile devices such as PDAs and Smartphones, and only embedded Linux is poised to represent a major long-term across-the-board competitor to Microsoft." The Register has another story about the study.
PC's in any form will not be replaced by anything that cannot beat it in gaming quality. Until my palm can play a Quake, a Half Life, or a Freelancer BETTER than my pc, I'm not unplugging.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
There will always be a use for wired PCs. This is exactly why Desknotes were made: It's a laptop computer and makes the employees happy because they have a cool little toy, but they still can't leave the desk because there is not battery on the unit, thus forcing you to be (1) tethered to a wall, presumeably in the office while doing work, or (2) carry a small power generator with you.
Handheld devices are great and all, but people want something that they can do everything on, all at once. When we see a handheld device that runs at 2Ghz (or equivalent speeds at a different frequency) and has a 17" screen on it, then it will be post-pc era. Tablet PCs have come close, and Laptops are there, but none of them are handheld.
The article talks about market share of embedded vs. oem distributions of operating systems, but I just don't see how the embedded market will span from the business users to the home BF1942 players and Kazaa users.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Epoc seems to be powering quite a lot more phones these days then anything else. With the phone market so much bigger in terms of numbers then the pc market, let alone the handheld market, is epoc not poised to beat Windows CE?
One guess as to who funded this study. These "studies for hire" places are almost always questionable.
It will be much much easier on everyone when there is essentially no upgradability from machine to machine and we buy a new machine every 3 years.
What does "post-pc" mean? I cannot tell from the articles linked what the original author intended. It would be very easy to interpret these articles as implying that handhelds will dominate the consumer's future over PCs. But this is not what the market data shows. It shows that handheld sales will dominate.
And what is the difference? The difference is this: I own a PC or two already. They work just fine for me, have plenty of power, and will be that way two years from now (assuming I don't want Longhorn or some other future bloated software). So I won't need to buy a PC. But I don't have a handheld, so I might choose to buy one. So might my wife. Or we might get a notebook. But the PC would still be our dominant mode of computing.
Perhaps this is obvious to everyone already. But the article is poorly written on this score and could easily lead to confusion, a confusion which then plays itself out in non-geeks running around thinking that geeks are saying PCs are dead. Then when we're still using PCs in a few years, they'll point and laugh at us for our silly predictions. Its happened before...
PalmOs has almost no following outside the pda market. The pda market is rather small compared to the overall embedded market. PalmOs based smart phones have failed to take off.
People get way too caught up in "what's going to replace what" these days. Desktop computers will always be around, they will merely be complimented (not replaced) by handhelds. Think of the desktop pc as your house. It's big, takes a lot of space, and expensive, but when you're in and stationary that's what you want. Now your handheld is your car. It's mobile, has lots of things similiar to things in the house (seats you could take a nap in while pulled off. trunk to keep things in. mini stereo system. etc). The car's mobility is a wonderful thing and allows us to live and work in a completely different way, but no time soon are people going to ditch their houses and start living out of their car.
;).
Laptops are like camper trailers. Bulky and tedious to carry around, but in a pinch they serve quite well as a below average house
So? Does this mean the CE based devices will be performing the same tasks the PCs were?
Almost certainly not.
Further, in five years Linux based PCs "may outsell" Windows based PCs. For that matter Macs "may outsell" Windows based PCs in five years. The point being, most pundits crystal balls have been pretty cloudy over the years.
For myself, I'm pretty sure I'll be buying new PCs at about the same rate I buy new PDAs - every two years or so as the new technology becomes too compelling to pass up. ;-)
The one trend I think will continue is the intrusion of "desknotes" onto the scene. These will be notebook machines that are powerful enough to completely replace desktops for 99% of computer users. I hope they'll plug into a (Hypertransport?) connection that'll allow external AGP and PCI devices in the docking station, providing upgradeable graphics at least when used in the desktop role. One hopes the processors won't run hot enough to really endanger the users though... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
In my mind, the only things that make people upgrade their PCs at all are games. Most people use their computers for chatting, browsing, email, games, and a -little- word processing - probably in that order. The game, hardware, and OS industry knows this.
As a result, all three industries work together to an extent. OSes need upgrades when new hardware comes out, new hardware needs new OSes, and games need both. Thus, they end up making colateral income for each other, as one component advances, all the others must. Otherwise, each industry would probably have stagnated without the other.
Now, portables, however, don't really do the 'game' thing. They're really just fancy web appliances with word processors. For most people, a WinCE device with a couple hundred megs of storage and a decent display/keyboard would be more than sufficient for all that they do (legally): just include solitaire, IE, and a couple chat programs with your basic loadout. I see this working for a large extent, especially with the convention of WiFi. I'm thinking a family of 5 (with, say, 3 internet addicts) would much rather spend 1k$ on 3 portable devices than 1 large desktop device that only one person can use at a time.
Price would have to be quite competitive, of course, since most people want gaming, too. Personally, I see embedded WinXP (or whatever equivilant product MS comes out with next) being more common than WinCE. WinCE is for low-end stuff.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I bought a computer this year. I didn't buy it with Windows. Is this a case of me not buying a PC?
If I buy a PDA that doesn't have WinCE, will I not be buying a PDA?
This might be a useful comparison (Windows vs WinCE) within one company's market, but ignores a two things going on in the market as a whole. Now, maybe my PC purchase and purchases like it are small enough to be written off as statistical noise, but are those PDAs? I rather doubt it.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Sure there a few commodity hardware vendors that ship pretty much the same WinCE devices as eachother: HP, Dell, Toshiba, Samsung.
But the market is much larger that that: Palm, Sony, Handspring, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp, IBM, Apple,Sendo, etc that ship innovative produces based on the best OS for their needs: Symbian, Linux, Palm, Homegrown.
Thes vendors innovative devices keeps filling in the crack in the maeketplace - while the WinCE market is limited to Palm IIIC wanabees and friken-huce 'cell phones' that bing you back to the Motorola 'Brick' days.
Want a ruged computing device: Telelogix
Want a server in your pocket: Sharp/IBM
Want tunes: iPod
Want the web on you cellphone: Ericsoon 800
Choic, Choice Choice!
Where's the WinCE version of these deviced: don't exit.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
That's a good question. And I have some anecdotal evidence that many Windows based handhelds are more stable. I have only crashed a WinCE device once, and I simply removed the battery, put it back in, and everything worked again.
That said, there is less propensity to crash in that the hardware driver conflicts that you have on a full size desktop are not as diverse.
By having some kind of control of what you plug in, and add on to your handheld, I notice a lot less crashes.
the OS is tweaked a bit by the manufacturer (in my case Compaq) so that the hardware conflicts are minimized. I think this is why you can not "upgrade" your handheld like you can a desktop.
Of course all of this limits my freedom to do what I want with my device, but allows the greater public stability.
One side note, I have never seen a BSOD on Windows CE. However when mine did "crash" I was unable to do anything. In fact the power button did not even work.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
Sure, handheld/embedded devices will outsell PC's over time. That falls into the Bleeding Obvious category of statistic. Duh.
What the key question here turns out to be is this: What is a PC? If, by "PC", you mean monolithic desktop/laptop systems that use X86-compatible processors and run Microsoft Windows, well, then it's a no-brainer. That means Linux desktops will chip away at that, MacOS will chip at that, every Palm sold hits that figure - not to mention the WinCE devices. If a PC is defined as any sort of desktop/laptop general computing device - well, that takes the plot line out a lot farther.
The other thing to consider is that palmtop operating systems (CE, Palm, etc.) are penetrating ever-farther into the realm of consumer devices. So it's not an outrageous concept - but I don't think CE as an OS will ever pass Windows by itself. No friggin' way.
Will the combined sales of organizers, MP3 players, cellphones, DVR's, and other devices that can get and benefit from a useful embedded OS pass the sales of traditional X86 "PC's"? I'm sure of it.
But by the time this comes to pass, your MP3 player may well have more computing firepower than your desktop does today. And then PC's would likely be the niche devices.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The article talks about handheld, consumer and embedded applications tied to WindowsCE. Of COURSE it'll outsell PCs, a PC is a single device whereas handheld and consumer devices cover a huge spectrum of goods. And when they quote a 250% increase in sales of hand held computers, notice they fail to tell you the exact number of sales to date.
Does it spell the death of the PC? No, wishful thinking at best, preemptive marketing at worst. This piece is spouting someone's paid marketing drivel, and it wouldn't surprise me if the path leads to Redmond.
Even if that is the case, it again shows that the people in Redmond learned from big old bad tobacco. Diversify! They knew long ago the gravy train from personal computers couldn't go on forever, and they also knew that consumer electronics would be thristy for more powerful embedded operating systems.
WindowsCE isn't all that bad, but certainly Microsoft is fooling itself if it thinks it's a one-stop-shop for an OS for embedded devices.
Um... what about Symbian? Or Palm? Or even Pixo, for that matter?
And let us never forget the ever-popular Pom Pilot...
My favorite idea for the replacement for the PC in the home would be something along the lines of networking-plus. There would be a bunch of modules connected by . One module would be for data storage. One for data archiving. One for audio/video output. One for video recording. One for video game playing. And possibly normal computer tacked on for general use (oh yeah, one more module for web-browsing). Kinda like a component TiVo that could syncronize all your radios and televisions. I think Sony is working on this already. Probably some other people are as well.
For the office, I think the tablet PC or alternatively, flat-screens with built in interface devices linked to stationary computers via wireless, would be the mid-to-near future. This way a single device could be carried around from station to station instead of having multiple devices, instead of requiring multiple stationary PCs. And they can display much more than pocket PCs.
In both markets I don't think that WinCE will dominate since it will cost money for the developer. Instead, manufacturers (especially those who MS cannot extort) will opt for a lower cost alternative (GNU/Linux).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I keep hearing about this "Dawn of the PC era", but the simple truth still stands. Handheld devices are great at a few simple tasks, calendaring, scheduling and other everyday/office tasks. They are also very good at communication, but they suck as a platform. The advantage the PC has is its multi-purpose orientation. It is possible to do virtually anything with a PC. The functions that a PC can do can be completely different from each other, unlike handheld devices which have very narrow use/ability. (Also, for handhelds to be truly functional, more needs to be displayed to the user, and that is hard with small screens.) Until the handheld platform becomes as diverse as the PC platform, the sun will shine in this era.
Free speech is getting expensive...
The things that they hope will be missing in these new non-desktop devices are:
Sorry. We don't want our dumb terminals back, and we don't want little gameboy like devices that tether us to the Man's information network.
I have and develop on a Windows CE device. I have found it to be fairly stable as an OS, but the programs aren't all well-behaved. Windows MediaPlayer can lose its mind sometimes when I boot if I didn't completely stop the app previously before turning the device off. Sometimes action buttons can be unresponsive (a soft reset fixes this).
There are similar "hardware" related issues particular to each device, which just shows that it mostly is hardware related and the designers are still working out the kinks. Much like laptops 10+ years ago, but I think this will reach a much better polished state earlier.
Developing for it has been sometimes frustrating, but overall a better impression than I expected. I use Keuchel's celib as a porting layer, which provides lots of POSIX stuff and traditional APIs that the CE OS lacks, making it easy to port apps (this is what CE emacs, tcl/tk, perl/tk, python, etc. all rely on). While "ramping up", I crashed my stuff all the time on the CE device and it just pops up with this "Just In Time Debugging" window that asks if I wanted to debug. Sort of like mini-Dr. Watson. I now use the embedded visual tools from MS (BTW, all CE development tools are currently free from MS), which is a modified VC++ that lets me select an executable that I built (cross-compiled) on my Win2K box, select the target device I want to run on (connected via ActiveSync), and it copies the executable over and runs it in the debugger. This is a Very Nice setup.
All in all, to get to your question, I have found the OS itself to be quite stable, even in the face of badly behaved apps. The software itself has some fine-tuning (I'm not up to the latest software patchlevel, which I know fixes some problems I've seen).
How many times have we seen this "post-PC" bullshit come and go? I've been around long enough to have seen it come and go several times.
Do you remember during the Microsoft anti-trust trial when journalists were saying the trial was irrelevant because new technologies were already making PC irrelevant and would soon put Microsoft out of business? Internet appliances, handheld devices, etc.
Just ignore it. It's crap.
I know this device isn't quite a PDA, but it's closer to it than the gameboy is - the nokia n-gage is getting closer to uniting a mobile, PDA and portable gaming console (http://www.n-gage.com/n-gage/home.html). But imo the two will exist side by side, just as gamers often have both a console and a gba (for example.
And has been for decades. The personal automobile outsells them by quite a large margin.
Well, unless, of course, you need a tractor instead of a BMW M5.
Oddly enough they are not interchangable. Go figure.
Come to think of it sporks outsell handheld devices, so replace your PDA with a spork.
The article is silly.
KFG
Thanks for pointing that out. All these growth studies are nothing more than a wad of self-serving B.S. Look back 2 or 3 years at what the forecasts of the day were predicting and you'll find that the majority of them were nowhere near being correct.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
As far as I can tell, this esimate assumes following:
1. WinCE will capture a large marketshare in a cell phone market.
This seems very unlikely, since virtually all big and medium (Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung) cell phone manufacturers have chosen a Symbian instead of WinCE.
2. Sales of PDAs will rise very quickly.
According to the other estimate, sales of smartphone will outstip PDA sales in this year. As smartphones will become more advanced, PDAs won't be as attractive as they're today. While many companies will buy PDAs for workers, I doubt that sales will singificantly increase in a consumer market.
After all, the more devices you have the more diffucult it becomes to manage them (carrying around, recharging battery, syncing, etc..). Since many people already have a cell phone, it's more logical for them to buy a smartphone instead of PDA.
In the last year about 400 million of cell phones and 12 million of PDAs were sold. Now if we assume that in 2008 sales of cell phones will rise to 600 million and WinCE captures 5% marketshare (which is a lot since many of those 600 million phones will be very simple and won't need an advanced OS) and PDA sales will triple, we will have about 66 million WinCE devices sold in 2008 (assuming 100% marketshare in the PDAs).
Article estimates that there will be 200-220 million WinCE devices sold in 2008...
Here is why it won't work:
A PDA's screen is terrible for web browsing because of its size.
It is easier to use a full size keyboard to enter any significant amount of data.
If you can't charge it when required it is possible to lose data. (this happened to me once when I forgot the charger on vacation)
Its small size makes it easy to steal and if you don't have a pc you won't have a backup for your data.
A PDA is best used as an extension for your computer, it is not a replacement for your PC.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
Every year, people (I mean the teaming masses wallowing in their computer ignorance) are getting slowly smarter about their computers. It is now something of joke, but the grandmother who spends her time sending e-mail and playing bridge is a good example. So basically, the basic users are getting smarter, and more demanding, about computers.
So my question is: why, oh why, would they suddenly decide to give up this machine that they can communicate with, do their taxes with, play Heart$ or whatever on, "surf" the internet with, etc. and trade it in on a bunch of over specialized little boxes with way less computing power? Doing so would be going against the trend of increasing knowledge and computer familiarity.
This is a dream by the manufacturers that have worked themselves into a corner because PC's have become a commodity. This is also Bill Gates' network refrigerator and talking house dream. Oddly enough, in these schemes, the PC just disappears. I don't see any trends going in this direction. The whole PDA thing took off because you can hook them up to your PC.
But I think this is a marketing argument and not even a consumer argument.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Why would CE devices outselling desktops constitute a 'Post PC' era? They have different uses. If popularity is the only measure, then I could argue that we're already in a Post PC Era because calculator sales dwarf those of PCs.