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Gates Claims PC Era Not Over Yet
An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates has collaborated to pen a response to the Wall Street Journal's recent claim that we are at the end of the PC era. From the article: 'The reality is a little different. The truth is that the model which has fueled the incredible popularity and affordability of the PC will continue to drive innovation and choice in the burgeoning area of personal devices such as cell phones, digital players and mobile PCs. As such, the PC is becoming more important and popular as a key enabler for these new digital scenarios in every corner of the world, from Indianapolis to Istanbul. If anything, it is, to paraphrase Churchill, perhaps the end of the beginning: the end of the first phase in the life of a young and evolving technology that is just now becoming as ubiquitous as the TV or the automobile.'"
hotels aren't going to put their front desk software on a phone, businesses aren't going to hire people to work on pda's.
The PC will always be around, but it's no longer driving the tech marketplace. Cell phones aren't a substitute, but they're one of four or five things, which, in combination, leave the PC in the support role.
PC's will be used to produce content, consumer devices will be used to watch/listen/play. Communication will be split among the platforms.
Until other devices can provide an easy way to type a paper, type an email, view complicated websites, look at your digital pictures, edit a picture, write shell scripts or view large amounts of data conveniently on other platforms, we will not see the death of the desktop. Televisions, PDAs and cell phones lack the resolution to view many useful websites ( /. looks horrible on my palm).
What will come next (imo) is the comoditization of the software and the rise of the service model. The service model will work on all your devices including the desktop. What will make money for companies is how well their service integrates with the multitude of devices out there. Apple is using the Verizon approach of controlling the device and the hardware. This means people are locked in to their service and when they decide to pull features on their new devices, there is no out. If music you purchased on the iTunes music store will only play on an iPod, you have reason to keep it. What happens when mp3 files no longer play on the next gen iPod (which u will need to play your online purchases)... many people will lose a large portion of their music library.
MS here is like the GSM companies. They will provide the service; you just need to get a compatible device which can have whatever features they put in. As w/ the ability to install MS-DOS on PC clones, this is a great business model that will benefit the consumer in the long run as it gives more options (even if the current gen of iTunes+iPod is better).
* now I only was able to read the 2nd article (about apple's business model) becau se the 1st required me to log in... I will wait until someone posts the content of the first to see how off topic I am
When all else fails, try.
If we're talking about work and email and such - sure, the PC isn't going anywhere.
But I was asking My Lovely Wife (MLW) if she wanted me to buy her a copy of Sodoku for her iBook, since she's always using my DS to play "Brain Age" for the training and Sodoku. (Which leaves me unable to play my new "Super Mario Brothers" right now.)
She shook her head. "No, because on this, I can write down the answers, while with my laptop I'd have to enter it in, and it would get annoying."
I think there's something here. Look at console game sales opposed to PC game sales - sure, PC game sales aren't going away, but consoles are clearly dominating. Plug in to TV, and done. Look at the Wii - in a lot of ways, it's really emulating the gaming of the PC only in a true console mode (point and aim, swing and hit the ball - simple as can be).
The PC isn't going away - but I don't think it's the big deal it once was for all things computer. It's still important, but not for "all things".
Of course, that's just my opinion - it could be wrong. Now, if I can just get that DS away from her....
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
the PC is becoming more important and popular as a key enabler for these new digital scenarios in every corner of the world,
Very true, but not the Windows PC.
Vista may well mark the end of the Windows era.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?
of the PC every six months or so. It seems to have started with the idea of "dumb" terminals in the 90's - which would lead us back to servers (mainframes) which the PC got us away from in some part in the first place. From then on, that same idea has been resurrected time and again for some reason (and hidden agenda).
Unless they annouce what will take it's place (typing on a PDA, playing games on a cellphone? I don't think so) - I'll just take the predictions as more mindless punditry and don't even need Billy to tell me such.
Looking through Microsoft glasses is like trying to look through a stained glass window. The colors are pretty, but you can't make out anything clearly on the other side. The rise of the networked PC was supposed to be the end of the mainframe, but we are seeing a resurgence there. Big bad IBM isn't so bad anymore. The multimedia PC miracle that was being pushed to ignorant consumers buying 486SX PC's only started achieving its promise almost decade later. The Internet _is_ a big thing. .Net is not multiplatform for any of Microsoft's doing. Linux is not a toy OS. OSS is not a cancer. Java is not dead. NT wasn't bullet proof. XP wasn't secure. Tablet PC's aren't everywhere. And people weren't stupid enough to fall for Hailstorm.
To their credit, they've done a lot of stuff, but predictions is not something I think they do well.
The only thing standing in the way is the current monopoly on ip addresses and the crappiness of the average OS. If every person could have their home computer running as a server all of this would be different. All we need is static IPs assigned to everyone with a broadband connection (not fricking www.IBLOWCHUNKS.com crap, IP addresses, yes they are in fact easier to remember and understand than PHONE NUMBERS!!!!). I cannot begin to count the number of times others who do not know what they are doing have envied my ability to serve them pictures, my own pages, whatever. When that happens, everybody will want a 2 processor dual core 4 gb ram dell box. You would think the computer companies could figure this out on their own. Oh the implications.... The really ironic bit is that Bill Gates POS operating system is the major obstical (right behind the phone companies) for this. The next really big move in computers will be a truly open internet and everyone running OS X, Linux, BSD, or Solaris. When that happens, everything will change.
I see the PC being only partially supplanted by cellphones and other mobile devices. Did tiny portable televisions supplant the living room television? No, because they're just not as nice.
Mobile phones have largely replaced landline phones for a lot of people because they're able to do almost everything better than landline phones (portability, easy address book address) at a comparable price (an extra $20 a month or so).
However, mobile phones and PDAs do not do everything better than traditional PCs. Their advantages are price, portability, and simplicity - all extremely important traits that will allow them to carve out more and more market share over time.
However, for the forseeable future (10-20 years?) PCs will be several orders of magnitudes more powerful than mobile devices when it comes to storage capacity, power, display, and input devices.
Other aspects will take even longer (25+ years?) to be bested by mobile devices due to the sheer physical limits of mobile devices - big screens and comfortable input devices. Over time, I'm sure creators mobile devices will overcome these challenges. We've all seen scifi movies where users have portable 10-megapixel displays that are the size of dimes and can be worn as an eyepiece and I'm sure bright MIT grads are working to make that a reality in some lab somewhere.
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They're being hobbled on purpose. My phone has as much CPU and memory as most of the computers that ran Office 97 when it was released. With a dock that provided VGA and USB, it could connect to external hard drives, monitor, mouse/keyboard etc and become the core of a desktop machine.
There's a theshold effect here. Once a computer (including PDA, phone etc) has enough grunt to do email/office/web etc, it's enough of a computer for most users. This generation of PDA/Phones has reached that threshold, and I suspect the next generation will surpass it. All they need is connectivity to external display and input devices and they're a complete solution.
The need for the big box and grunty CPU is mostly marketing and mindset.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The best case in point in the mainframe. It was developed into a mature product over the mid 1900s, and then reached it peak in the late 60's. By the late 80's, the microcomputer underdog was replacing the mainframe in many applications. Sure there are still places a mainframe is used, but the PC was seen to be more flexible, and allowed a more democratic use of technology. The PC became the GPC, and the mainframe was relegated to a few verticle markets.
Well the PC has had it's time in the sun, and we are seeing the same problems. Huge investments, not really in hardware, but in software. Single vendor lock backed by the holding for ransom of critcal company data in proprietary formats. Incredible problems on managing thousands of individual machines. THe expectations that novices can manage thier own machines. All this has proven quite unrealistic.
Some of us will continue to use the PC for many years in the same way that some of us welcomed mainframe access until the terminal was torn away from our grasps. However, those that just want a solution, might choose other routes. Web services might be that route. For a bussiness we might have a hybrid situation of central servers and cheap smart terminals. This has been tried, but what has killed it is that MS still wants the full license fee, so there is not cost saving. We still need to pay MS, and we still need to have a computer that can run the OS, even if we need this power for nothing else.
Some enterprising accountant will one day force the question of why does every worker bee need an individualized mid range computer, when all we really run is 2 applications that can be served over the network, email, and a browser, all of which can be run on a much cheaper machine and *nix. No reason to have MS extort money, no reason to have the BSA on our asses and in our bussinesses. I know people who worked with IBM, and they said this kind of greedy behavior is exactly what almost killed IBM, and it will be what kills the PC.
And Dell and the others are scared. MS needs to sell upgrades of the OS. Dell needs an excuse for consumers to by new machines. If the office goes to cheaper appliances to run the few applications, instead of the GPC, then the employess will run the same stuff at home. Some who wants games might go with a PC, or a console. Other might go with Apple. But most might go witht the Wal*Mart special that will do what it needs to do, connect to the web services, and not require the $100 investment in spyware protection, the continuous security upgrades, and the annoying serial numbers. It will just work.
Gates want the pc era to last forever because MS does not learn the lessons of history. Therefore they are going to be destined to repeat the history. In 10 years it will be as quaint to have a PC in your house as it is to have a wood burning stove.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Gates may be right in that the PC isn't going away tomorrow, but as always, it's a pain having to endure his annoying big brother attitude, patting our collective heads, telling us what's what: "The reality is a little different. The truth is..." Technology is continually moving forward, and Microsoft's thinking apparently isn't, so things will probably change rather rapidly. The truth is we don't know what things will look like. Nor does Gates or Microsoft.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
With a dock that provided VGA and USB, it could connect to external hard drives, monitor, mouse/keyboard etc and become the core of a desktop machine.
That's still essentially a PC, just with a hot-swappable CPU. I don't really see that catching on; what advantage do you have in being able to pick your CPU up, walk around and take calls on it?
It might save a little money - you can get low-end CPUs quite cheaply these days - but it would have a nasty effect on your system. Can you imagine the lag on a system that has its CPU communicate with the bus over USB?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
You underestimate the importance of both wires and PC's.
To expand on a previous poster's point, the PC provides an excellent platform for numerous uses, many of which share the same basic set of requirements.
As for wireless networking, I don't see wired networking disappearing any time soon. Some uses that require less bandwidth, such as a laptop computer (I'm typing on one right now) can be replaced. However, Ethernet has significant advantages over wireless. As I understand it, a large room full of gamers absolutely requires Ethernet because WiFi has limitations on how many users can be connected to a wireless system (become of limitations on spectrums). Servers rooms and Internet backbones are also areas where Ethernet won't be replaced. When speed is the top priority, Ethernet wins any day. IEEE has recently announced that it is working on 802.11n, a form of wireless networking with a theoretical limit of 540 megabits per second. Okay, sounds pretty good, 540000000 bits per second. Meanwhile, Ethernet already has 10 gigabits per second - that's 10000000000 bit per second - with a work on a standard for 100 gigabits per second - that's 100000000000 bits per second. Wireless simply doesn't work in many situations.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Companies rarely choose the best product. Thin client stations have been around for ages, but companies buy PCs. They will continue to do so, and most companies will insist on Dell/Intel/Windows regardless of whether or not those are the best choices.
The fact that client stations have been around for ages, yet are not chosen, strongly suggests they are not the best solution. One possible reason: The GP mentioned a Sun Ray, they are $299 without display. The entry level Dell Dimension B110 is $299 with a 17" monitor. More possible reasons: The UI/Front end software is already written and working, and it's DOS, OS/2, or Windows based.
Look at Google: More and more tools are becoming available that are as good as anything on windows for 95% of the users - Mail, Calender, a MS Word compatible tool (http://www.writely.com) for starters ... Wait and see. A lot of people are fed up with Gates goal of world dominance.
The funny thing is, both Gates _and_ Wall Street are "right", but they're talking about different things.
From the point of view of whether the PC will disappear and people will start running their corporate software on PDAs (yeah, that would be a "fun" data entry job), Gates is right. The PC isn't going anywhere any time soon.
But I suspect that's not what Wall Street is talking about. Wall Street isn't about having a product or a steady market, but about buying and selling shares. A company which just has a steady product and a steady income isn't that interesting there, because its shares don't go up by that much, if at all. You don't make the big bucks trading those.
What you want ideally is something with seemingly exponential growth. (Even if it can't be sustained much longer, you can probably find an idiot who can be dazzled by graphs showing that in 20 years they'll have their products in 10 billion houses and bogus formulas calculating a fair share value based on that prediction. He'll buy your shares for that price.) You want spectacular announcements driving the share values up. Etc.
Companies just having a steady market and income are boring in that aspect. They may make enough money to stay afloat for ever, but you won't make a mint trading their shares.
Cue investors starting to scream for measures that can help them hype the shares before they dump them, even if they mean gutting the company in the long term. E.g., firing a quarter of the employees in the name of cost savings can create a temporary surge in profits and drive shares up. So it's always a popular thing to demand. It may be unsustainable or outright fatal in the long run (see for example SGI exitting the graphics arena without even a fight back then, and where SGI is now), but in the short run it makes Wall Street very happy.
(And I'm not even gonna go into such abnormal situations as a profitable company being outright valued a negative sum. Seriously. At one point 3Com was seen by investors as being worth _less_ than the shares it owned in Palm Inc. Divisions with real products, market and income were basically worth a negative sum. Cue idiotic investors starting to scream that 3Com should get rid of those.)
From the Wall Street perspective the PC era is over not because the PC market is somehow disappearing, but because the exponential growth is long gone and in fact growth is slowing down. Even the upgrade cycles are slowing down. E.g., I have a 2.26 GHz workstation at work and, well, look at when Intel launched that CPU and how many years ago "Moore's Law" said a 4.5 GHz replacement should have been available... and still isn't. It used to be that a 3 year-old PC would be almost obsolete, whereas nowadays for most businesses and even most home users (hardcore gamers notwithstanding) there's very little reason to buy a new one.
And major hype-worthy announcements are getting fewer and far in between. Vista is taking for ever to come out, and just can't be used to create the same hype as, say, Windows 95's move to 32 bits anyway.
Even if you look at other companies than MS, well, look at the Slashdot headlines form the last year. There just isn't anything sounding like "fast growing company with killer app/hardware/whatever, poised to be worth tens of billions in the long run", so there's nothing to promise making $$$$ fast with their shares. Everywhere it's just small upgrades and incremental tweaks. What passes for a tech headline these days is something like "AMD announces DDR2 support next year".
So I suspect that's what Wall Street means by PC era being over. They see the same turning into a steady industry as Gates sees, but from their perspective tere's a lot less to be excited about that future.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The problem with cell phones is that they depend on phone companies.
Call phones have the potential to be the ultimate thin client, all the technoligy is there -- processing power on the handset, local storage, the ability to send/receive data to any server based system via gprs they even have unique device identifiers and the potential for stronger authentication than is possable on PC systems.
Plus with the phone you have a payment/billing mecahnism is place, forget paypal and 16 digit credit card numbers, you just press the OK button on your phone.
But with the exception of DoCoMo in Japan the potential is hampered by service providers who think SMS is gee whiz technoligy; who price any useful innovation out of the market (like gprs, it once cost me 3 euros to use my phones web browser to access the phone companies site to get a support number); and who are not interested in third party services where they do not collect the bulk of the money from the transaction.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
The end of PC era? Yes in a way it is true. But not by replacing PC with gadgets like some people think. It is time for more connectivity. Today computers are too powerful for tasks they are dealing with. As more and more gadgets are internet aware and speeds of local/home connections are growing it's time for some kind of central computer oriented structure.
I see house with a powerful server and large data storage with different connectivity options. One thing that will certenly change soon is that other computers/gadgets are going to be more purpose made (Digital TV, VOIP phone,movie purchasing etc will all connect to server).And things are going this way already. Just think about game consoles etc. Personal computer as we know it today will stay but in a form of laptop or low power console with storage and applications built on a home server. When avarage speed of home connection is going to be sufficient there will be no need for home servers and we will probably have to buy some data storage space on net and decide which OS to boot on our console that day and which programs to use.I predicted this happening in 1996 and things are going this way ever since with some huge movements lately. In terms of software development Linux and open source has a bright future. Reason for this is quick adoption of new hardware structures(processors) and internet . Microsoft is aware of this situation and will do/is doing anything to keep afloat this movement but it will make a huge problems for them too keep with such a quick process and still keep the quality of their products. I hope open source movement is aware of this happening and will use it's advantages.
With the wave of virtualization technologies starting to pop up, people have a wider variety of applications available to them than ever before. Also, the idea of web-based productivity suites and other OS-independent technologies indicate that the trend is towards becoming more and more technology independent.
Microsoft is not acknowledging these trends and is continuing on its way as it always has. If they don't change direction soon, they will be a dinosaur.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
"these new digital scenarios in every corner of the world, from Indianapolis to Istanbul"
As usual, the USA is the center of a world, and those exotic other places are in the corners.
Indianapolis, altho exotic, is actually part of the USA.