Slashdot Mirror
The PC Is Not Dead
Belle writes "Bill Gates has an op-ed in this morning's BW Online, in which he responds to the magazine's question Is the PC dead? with a resounding "No!" and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come." From the article: "The result is that the personal computer has become far more than a cog in the machine of corporate computing -- it's an essential tool for every individual in the organization. Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt."
In addition to Bill's reasoning, which I don't entirely follow, there is also the question of the hobbyist/games user. Business users may choose to go thin-client, but in my opinion, the user who is technically-minded will never be satisfied with any of the so-called replacements for the personal computer, and I don't personally think that any of these replacements will ever take off outside of the office.
If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives. Those who appreciate technology will have little reason to follow this lead, and therefore will not.
On the other hand, those home users who do not enjoy technology, who simply wish to treat their computer as a dumb interface to DRMed MP3s and the web/email will probably be delighted with a 'thin client'. There will still continue to be money in the other market for a while, though. As for 'thin clients' in the office, then I say, sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing. They just won't kill the home PC. That's my take on this.
Last of all: Is it just me or does someone predict this every year? I first heard it in about 1996, and I'm still waiting! This claim wears even more thin with every passing year...
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
I just read that so called op-ed piece and I think my ears may be bleeding from the sheer amount of marketing speak.
Bill may think web services are the next great thing for the PC "ecosystem" (WTF? when did my office become wild planet?), but quite frankly, he needs to worry about making the PC safe, secure, and usable first.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
I hate this kind of tech marketing drivel. I'm not just bashing Gates specifically, and in fact I'd say this article isn't as bad as most, but it still boils down to a trite load of platitudes. You can summarize this kind of article easily:
"Long time ago dumb terminals look now richly appointed digital tapestry personal computing unleash potential provide collaborative strategic business enhancers future digito-infotainment convergence aggregation hub integrating synergies for advancement of opportunity. Buy more. Thanks. Oh, and thin clients suck, give people their own hard drive for all the above to happen. Thanks again."
Seriously, is there anything notable here? So very insight-free.
Quite honstly, most users could work perfectly fine with a dumb terminal. All most office workers need is printer access, a web browser and basic office apps. Why do I need to set each of them up with a PC for that?
And now with Flash memory sticks, you can run entire environments separate from the OS entirely!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What we're seeing is really the continuation of the gradual shift from "big iron" mainframes to "microcomputers" to PCs to PDAs to iPods. Technology is becoming cheaper, more flexible, and more diversified.
I think the traditional PC is close to saturation. Where the money is are in things like media center/home theater PCs, secondary computers, and specialized machines. Since most everyone has a PC, the real quest is to use PC technology to replace other existing gadgets.
That's why small cheap computers like the Mac mini and home theater systems like Microsoft's Media Center Edition systems are growing while the PC market itself is relatively stagnant in comparison to the boom years.
Of course, the massive success of the iPod also points to a totally new market for consumer electronics that interfaces with a traditional PC acting like a "digital hub" as Steve Jobs calls it. That's why media features like DVD burners, FireWire and memory card inputs and large displays are the big selling points in PCs these days. It's not about a monolithic device that makes you sit in front of it to do everything, it's about a whole slew of gadgets that work seamlessly together to perform different tasks.
The concept of the PC won't go away, but the way in which PCs are used is slowly changing. It's like evolution usually goes - the big creatures die out and those smaller more agile ones flourish in the aftermath.
Year after year some guru/tech hotshot pronounces the death of a key technology (last year Gates singlehandedly declared the death sentence of DVDs) :P
The truth is that these are plain shots in the dark.
IMHO the PC is far from becoming dead, and I am happily watching as tech honchos tear their hairs off as most of the world population refuses to upgrade their equipment/software in 2 year-cycles, and realizes that 1ghz of ANYTHING plus 256MB of ANYTHING plus a 20GB drive is more than plenty for the average user's websurfing, mail-sending and pr0n viewing!
I know that Gates is replying to Businessweek, and so he has to claim that PCs will continue to "empower workers" as they gain in processing power and capability, but if he wanted to make an even more convincing argument, he should have talked about home users.
As computers get more and more powerful, I think it's going to mostly affect the two groups of users at the opposite ends of the spectrum: super-users and home users. Super users are those who need all the power they can get, all the time. These are the people working in medicine, in modeling, 3D work, video, etc...
Then you have the home users. Why will this effect home users more than corporate users? Because home usersdo more things! They'll start experimenting with audio and video on the computer (many of them already do). They'll try to run the latest games.
Finally, you have the middle-of-the-road office computer users - probably the very ones that BusinessWeek was originally talking about. These are the people whose PCs are supposedly doomed. And they might be. But the PC as a whole (as the Slashdot title would have us believe?) Not a chance.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
It seems like every interview I see with the guy, he's going on about how computing's future is so bright ya gotta wear shades, so-to-speak.
And then shortly after such claims, he always follows them up by pointing out that Windows will, of course, be there, paving the way for the next wave of computing.
There's something about overly optimistic people that make me immediately doubt what they're claiming. Bill's no exception... By always ignoring the bad (Windows exploits, virii, etc), and gushing about the very operating system which is causing most of these problems, he really paints a picture of someone who's totally out of touch with the modern computing scene.
To me at least...
The more you work with their bread'n'butter OS, the more you realize that Microsoft gears their software towards the home user, not the business. Enterprises are challenged to make XP conform to sound security models. Little things such as the fact that Windows Media Player overrides a screensaver lock by default (and good luck getting the group policy to fix this in Active Directory), to the assumption of root access by default on the XP workstation much less in the NOS itself (try changing the default network access from anything but the default -- suddenly, you can't view other machines in network neighborhood and users can't change their own passwords). Bill Gates gives "business" tongue and cheek service whilst his developers write an OS for the home and for entertainment....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I don't see the PC leaving us either today, tomorrow or next year. People walk around with them (laptops) so they can work away from the office, or they have their own special programs on their machine.
I think what he misses the opportunity to talk about isn't if the PC is going away, but "does Windows matter"? The last company I was at switched 95% of the company to Open Office to save costs (a 400 person environment for huge saving for them). Many of the penetration testers and security analysts I work with now use Macs because they can get to all of the UNIX tools they need without having to reboot into Windows to work on Microsoft Office files. (I know, they could do that in Crossover, but the Macs are easier - and these are hard core OpenBSD/Linux guys).
So the question is, does Windows dead? No, not yet, and I think like IBM they will always be around. But others are nipping at the heals, between Firefox on one end, consoles (which is eating away a lot of the game market from the PC), Apple is rising again (back to 5% by the end of this year by some analysts) - so MS can't just use the monopoly as a battering ram to force Windows on everyone.
They kind of remind me of Napoleon's march in Russia. Lots of momentum, big army, took over everything - but over time, the things that Napoleon couldn't fight (the weather, like Free software compitition), or supply chains (consoles eating away at the game market), or just dumb luck (Apple's iPod success turning into a method to draw users to buy new Macs, especially at $600 a pop) brought him down. Maybe 10, 15 years from now we'll look back at a market 33% Windows, 33% Apple, and 33% Linux (on the desktop - the server I imagine will be 40% Windows, 40% Linux/Unix, 20% Apple) and wonder how it all happened.
Funny that one of Mr. Gate's big heroes is Napoleon. I hadn't remembered it until I was almost done writing this.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"For a few hundred dollars per employee, companies can now empower their workers with raw processing power that would have been unfathomable just a few years ago. "
Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes.
Cost of hardware: apparently $0
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
He amassed his weatlh in the PC business. One might say that's a measurement of success. One might also say that such a successful person is qualified to speak about it more so than a random journalist. If he says positive things about it, where's your pile of cash that qualifies you to argue about it?
Now granted, I'll immediately concede that most of Microsoft's success comes from less than ethical business practices and marketing, rather than technology innovation.
I'd also admit that I detect a bit of underhanded marketing any time Bill Gates says ANYTHING about the computer industry.
Having said that, I'd still take his opinion over some cynical slashdot poster or ill-informed journalist about the computer industry.
Questionable quality and poor business practices aside... they are managing to sell a lot of stuff to a lot of people without the use of gun point. Though, they do buy and stop the sale of a lot of things at legal gun point.
Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!
If, as he suggests, the "Web-services revolution blurs the distinction between information, applications, and services on PCs and mobile devices", how exactly is the PC "the centerpiece of the innovation"? Wouldn't Web-services, and thus Web standards and networks, be the focal point?
Not just that, but most of Billy's wealth is still amassed as stock shares, which is potential wealth. Ie, that wealth isn't really his yet. So if he ever says anything disparaging against Microsoft he'll LOSE a truckload of money if the share price goes down.
That's why I really don't understand why investors take the word of company executives seriously, the executives are merely trying to keep their stock prices high.
It also seems somewhat wrong to let Gates write journalism columns anyway, because of the above conflict of interest. It's more-or-less giving Microsoft free advertising space (Or - can anyone point out any message where Gates actually said something worthwhile and also negative about Microsoft?). While I'm sure many journalists own certain stocks themselves, Billy is in a whole different class. He owns enough stock to buy several small nations, so giving him a platform in a supposedly neutral magazine to advertise just doesn't seem proper.
Free Mac Mini with Equal Opportunity
Email me or follow the homepage link
> Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.
Companies like, oh say... Microsoft.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Back when IBM (IBM ) launched its first personal computer in 1981, business computing was a scarce resource. If a company was large enough even to afford computers, they were mostly so-called dumb terminals hooked up to large mainframe computers.
Mr. Gates seems to forget the Apple II, which a lot of businesses owned before 1981. IBM did not create the idea of personal computers for business, they merely responded (grudgingly) to their customers.
Bill should know this - unless he's forgotten that his company existed before 1981 - he's no doubt just trying to spin it his way. In any case he doesn't actually address the issues in the original article which argues that intranet/internet based applications will make life easier for corporate computing.
People who can only spin the past are likely to be spun by the future.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
...in Retail the PC is responsible for customer wait times at the checkout counter - compared to 20 years ago transactions depended only on the skill of the cashier not PC software. ...in Automotive service car repairs require as long as 20 mins. for a Service Writer who's sole job is only to intake cars and enter their problems into the computer - compared to 20 years ago the car got dropped off someone took the keys and you were on your way 10 mins max. ...in Healthcare PC's stop your every point of progress through the system to verify your birthdate, name and address - compared to 20 years ago a nurse asked what you needed to see a doctor for took 5 mins.
The CRT is not dead! I see dozens of them in use every day and CompUSA has lot of them!
Film is not dead! I can buy those familiar yellow boxes of it right in my supermarket checkout line!
Vinyl LPs are not dead! DJ's still use them and you can buy new turntables in Best Buy!
The vacuum tube is not dead! Audio hobbyists still insist on them!
CP/M is not dead! It survives on in Novell Netware servers! Which are not dead, either!
The Oldsmobile is not dead! I still see them on the road!
VHF analog broadcasts are not dead!
Typewriters are not dead! Carbon paper is not dead! Slide rules are not dead! Rotary calculators are not dead! The Bodoni typeface is not dead! The Cinerama wide-screen process is not dead! Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines are not dead!
Bill Gates is not dead! And neither am I!
But Bill Gates and I are both older than we used to be.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Vorbis is dead
...Just like the PC.
Without support from the leading music player software
WinAmp plays Vorbis files just fine, thankyouverymuch. Oh, you meant that proprietary DRM-crippled bag of bits needed to redeem my winning Pepsi caps? Feh.
Actually, for accuracy, I would have to say "Windows Media Player plays Vorbis files just fine". But as you can well imagine, I find that even more intolerable than iTunes. And, since WinAmp comes in as #2 (with iTunes somewhere around #6, I believe), it will suffice to make my point - Namely, even something totally ubiquitous in the Mac doesn't even rank in the bigger picture. Biggest fish in the koi pond, meet a small shark.
and portable device
You mean the "Car CD player", most of which still don't even do MP3s? Or for more personally portable, the "CD Walkman", still about 10M units ahead of the iPod? Nope, no Ogg. No AAC, either.
Hey, I like the iPod. I consider it a cute little gadget. If Apple decided to play well with others, not charge more than everyone else for a given level of hardware, and lose the sneer, I'd probably buy one. But half a dozen comparable, cheaper, and most importantly, DRM-free devices exist from manufacturers that don't want to lock me in with their own proprietary format (well, you could point to ATRAC, but I don't even think Sony itself takes that seriously outside their MiniDisc recorders).
Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.
You mean Microsoft would grind to a halt.
Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would slingshot themselves to mach speed in terms of productivity.
Proverbs 21:19