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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."
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan 2005/tc20050119_5359.htm Its an editorial piece in which the author basicly states that the PC has hit its peak.
No smoking sigs indoors.
Have you ever worked in a Citrix environment? Have you ever experienced using a thin-client for the course of a year or more? You might want to consider that fact that the computer is nothing more than a TOOL and not a decoration.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
that is fast becoming dependant on the network and the network's application. This is regressing the PC to a media rich dumb/network terminal...
no sig yet
... the PC as an island of personal data is facing real threats:
... the future belongs to secure virtual infrastructure, secure distributed data, and redundant portable devices.
- invasion from parasitical software
- competition from smaller devices
- competition from web-based services
- ever cheaper hardware
Of course I'm typing this from a PC and I can't imagine any other way of working, but still... in 10 years' time:
- would I have to move physically to a box somewhere in order to read slashdot?
- would I have my data sitting on a single hard disk somewhere under a desk?
- would I be surfing on the public Internet using the same infrastructure as I use to (e.g.) access my bank accounts or write contract proposals?
The PC as "personal computer" is running out of reasons for being...
The PC will eventually be relegated to a keyboard, mouse, and screen.
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The circumstances that led to the PC revolution are long since past. When the anti-trust case against Microsoft was settled four years ago with no consequences, investors and entrepreneurs were told that there is no reason to bother to do anything Microsoft might have an interest in, because Microsoft would be free to use the Windows monopoly to crush them.
During the dot-com boom, almost all software talent went to Internet development, sucking the oxygen out of innovation meant for the PC. Bringing things on-line is important and valuable, but the 10,000th brochure website, or even the second on-line bookstore, is not innovation.
The dot-com crash in Silicon Valley has meant the loss of 400,000 jobs there and 400,000 people moving out of the valley. It's debatable how much of this is due to outsourcing, but for every job lost to some other location, that's one fewer young engineer cooking up ideas in a garage. India and China have gained, but the software industry has lost something by the scattering of young talent; the disappearance of tech veterans has long-term consequences, too.
There are still business opportunities in cleaning up security messes and customization of enterprise software products, and there always will be, but none of this really counts as innovation.
When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1995, it wasn't obvious that Microsoft was going to dominate the way it does today, or that the Internet would suck the oxygen out of other kinds of software projects for a while. The smart money and adventurous people have moved on to other things. Forever.
It is a lot easier to overcome fair-rights-denying DRM on a console where you can run and write programs that do this for you. It is a lot harder on an "Audrey", an iPod, or a Palm Pilot.
Do you think there would be anything like "PlayFair"/ hymm (which let us listen on our own machines to something we paid for) for iTunes files if iPods typically were connected directly to the Internet for music download, and there was no PC or Mac in between?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Not to mention administration. The biggest time-waster at my company is fixing users computers (hell sometimes mine included). Updating, upgrading, trying to hunt down and unreg all the gator entries, ...
Administration costs are insane for large corporations. Thin clients make that task a little more manageable. Only problem is when the main servers go down you're killing not just one user but a whole organization.
Certainly some computing should be personal. But some is not and should not be. I have to work ten times as hard on Windows PeeCees as I do on other computers to get them to do impersonal things, like send me a summary of their own activity for the last week without my having to push a button.
Some very useful computation is not personal, interactive, exploratory, or "an experience". And Microsoft traditionally just didn't "get" this. Like the old robots in Asimov's "Runaround", supposedly automatic processes just won't go without a human in the saddle giving orders. They are getting better at this, but still have far to go in order to catch up with the 1960s, let alone the 21st century.
I often laugh bitterly when I hear about the "increased productivity" attributed to gadgets that make me do everything manually rather than just doing the work and sending me a note on how it went.
If you want my recommendation for your software product, ask yourself, "would there be any point in having this run automatically when nobody is around?" And if the answer is "yes", *make it easy to do so*.
"As processing power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and advanced software continue to evolve at rates that meet or beat Moore's Law..."
Is it just me or does Moore's Law say nothing about networking, storage, or software? And also, hasn't the pace of technology been not quite keeping up with the Law recently? For example, despite other enhancements such as faster buses, CPU clock speed seems to have hovered around 3 GHz for a while.
Hmm... if Bill Gates can be this intellectually lazy, maybe Linux has a shot after all.
As "chief software architect", Bill Gates is responsible for killing a lot of in-house client side development. And don't make the claim that .NET is going to improve that situation, because Microsoft is going to introduce yet another major paradigm shift with Avalon.
Read Vendor Dependent Death Marches VS Open Kaizen
Is this http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/pearpc_x p.jpg
PearPC screen shot good enough for you? Works here.
...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.
Well... I moved my family to a thin client system based on RedHat 9 a few years back. So far it's worked out great. There is very little functionality that most users need that require a fullblown PC sitting in front of them. The current list of apps we use in thin client model are:
VNC +GDM - Remote Desktop Functionality
GNOME - Desktop Environment
Firefox - Web
Thunderbird - Mail
Sunbird - Calendaring
OpenOffice.org - Office Apps
GIMP - Image editing
Xine - Media player
XMMS - MP3/OGG player
WINE - For those "must have" Windows apps/games
GAIM - IM
DOSBox - For old DOS games
OpenVPN - To remotely access our VNC desktops
Printing is handled by the centrally attached Epson Photo printer and the "thin clients" are laptops with wireless NICs, custom scripts and VNC clients.
It works very well for our needs. I would say that the only needs not met by this set up are things like scanning photos (since the server is headless in the basement, putting a scanner down there would be inconvenient) and 3D games that need fast screen performance. This would be better if I moved to 802.11G probably. (hehehe.. I've played Quake 3 using VNC over an SSH tunnel viw a DSL line. Too slow to be playable, but it works) My point with all of this? It's possible to do this sort of thing. The fact that a non-geek like me can set it up indicates that it can certainly be done by experienced developers. It's just that no one has tried hard enough or had a decent plan to do it. Realistically, if the bandwidth was available on a wireless device and it was no more than a display, kb, mouse and audio terminal for a really powerful backend box, this WOULD take off for the home user. Why should our desktops be married to one location? That's just stupid. Your desktop should be accesible everywhere with all functionality available. The only thing that needs to catch up is bandwidth.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Well, lets see I got invloved in mainframe computers in the early 80's. Back then "departmental computing" was going to wipe mainframes out. Well they are still around and still growing and I still hear that "something" (Client/Server, "the web", Windows, Unix, Linux, etc.) is going to wipe them out.
I think you've hit the nail on the head right there--PCs are so cheap today. When you can get a full Dell (just for example) with monitor for only a few hundred dollars, thin clients have a much harder time being justified--especially since you're going to need some kind of server for them to run off of, the cost of which would be spread out accross all clients when comparing to a stand-alone PC. And, for most work uses, these cheapo PCs are more than enough. If you need more (i.e., graphic artists), you probably wouldn't be going with a thin client anyway.
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Mod it funny if you want, but Sun thin clients probably offer the best price/performance ratio of any setup out there for an office environment. I know of one network (one of the largest corporate law firms in the world) where every user has a PIV desktop that just runs the Citrix ICA client. It is locked down so user's cannot acces any local applications, just boot windows 2000 and run Citrix. All these PCs are a waste of money! A Sun ray thin client would be a great replacement, and could allow every user to upgrade their environment simply by upgrading the Citrix or Sun Ray server, and allow every user to cary the same session to any computer they work at (authenticate via smart card and username/password). It would also allow seamless intigration of remotly accessable apps running on Linux, Solaris, or another version of Linux. Sun thin client laptop's with wifi are also a pritty cool solution. They are finally available for under a grand. Check it out: http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobil e/comet/
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
mp3s, dvds, gamepads, cell phones, all peripherals are/will be the "thin clients" of what is now the PC which already has the power of early mainframes. Household appliances will either connect directly to the net or for security and other reasons connect through what is now the PC which will archive and update
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I do consulting for a major Wall Street firm. Their VPN/Remote Access solution includes the ability to use Citrix to access Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. 80% of their workforce can access all the tools they need to do their day-to-day job from any half way decent internet connected pc.
On top of that, if someone needs to access a non-standard app, they can use Citrix to access their own desktop via Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connectivity.
Even working as a developer, the only time I've ever needed to actually go to the desktop is to insert a usb thumb drive. Citrix has solutions for this as well, however, allowing you to use local USB devices like thumbdrives and printers as if they were attached to the remote machine.
With this level of remote computing, it is very easy to "pull the PC's from the desktop" for most users. Just assuming for a moment that you want to continue with a Microsoft based environment, you'd probably do the following...
The shift to thin clients will be piece by piece. Lots of families these days have a computer per person. Before long, the effort of keeping data while upgrading these will make network-attached storage worthwhile for the family.
I wouldn't be too surprised if the home of 2015 has all of the storage on a file server appliance, and the things that act like PCs boot off of USB sticks and look a lot like flat panel iMacs.
Desktops will never offload the processing power, because processing is cheaper than communications. They will offload the storage, because it is beneficial to have that accessible. "Thin clients" will primarily not have local storage, aside from removable media; otherwise, they will be similar to current PCs, because it is necessary or cost-effective to do everything else per-client. But the "identity" of a computer, as seen by the user, is really tied to the local storage, so users will feel like they have thin clients, and say things like "I like to use my computer in the family room because the processor is faster there", like they now say, "I like to play my video games in the family room, because the TV is bigger there."
Down near the end of that JE is a link to an old account of mine that explains how to use VNC and GDM together for session management. It's all pretty straightforward. I'll admit that one problem with my 'vncconnect' script is that if the remote desktop was left connected on one laptop, it will get disconnected by your new connection. This, in and of itself isn't a problem. What is a problem is that the OpenSSH tunnel (and esd server if used) will still be running on the other system. Occasionally I have to go back in and clean up the left over processes. I need to write a little more logic into the script to check for those orphaned processes. Not really a showstopper though...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o