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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...
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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!
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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.
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.
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();
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.
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.
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