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.

Comments

Not until

[yotto]

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.

Numbers Misleading?

[ErikRed1488]

My company has purchased about 150 PCs in the last year. We will not be buying any new desktop machines for the next three years. We do however plan to outfit most of the staff with Pocket PC based devices during that three year period. I'd guess that in the next five year period we'll purchase approximately about 125 new PCs. During that same period we'll probably purchase about 250 Pocket PC based PDAs. Mainly this is due to them not being useful as long. It has nothing to do with our plans to switch anyone from a PC to a PDA. Now, if you also count all the Smartphones that may be running a version of CE, our numbers could go from 250 to 500 easily in that same 5 year period. So, IMHO, PCs are going nowhere.

Wrong comparison.

[Paul Neubauer]

...Windows CE-based devices may outsell Windows-based PCs...

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.