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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.
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.
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. Sir William Gates should be awakened to the realization that as an approximately spherical object, our planet does not have corners!
Eh, but don't get me wrong, I'm used to it. After all in the room analogy, the USA must be the Windows (TM) of the world, and that's a lot worse than being in a corner
The PC era can be declared over, if and when:
1. Windows Vista - Service Pack 2 is released.
2. Microsoft releases a complete OS under "GPL 3.0 or later".
3. Software patents are declared illegal in the US.
4. Chinese firm releases complete PC - hardware and software, fully developed and built in-house - at under $100.
5. SCO defeats IBM and buys RedHat.
6. nVidia releases GPL drivers.
7. Symantec withdraws from security market, declaring Vista is 'unbreakable'.
8. DRM is declared illegal, DMCA revoked, and the RIAA dissolved.
9. Hurd 1.0 is available for download.
10. No more chairs in the Chair-Man's Office at Redmond.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
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 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.
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