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The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive
Hugh Pickens writes "Charlie Stross has written a very interesting essay, ostensibly about the 'real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash,' but really about how Jobs is betting Apple's future on an all-or-nothing push into a new market as Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland. Stross says that Apple is trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat — the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry and turn PC manufacturers into suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligible profit. 'Any threat to the growth of the app store software platform is going to be resisted, vigorously, at this stage,' writes Stross. 'And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem.' The long-term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary. 'This is why there's a stench of panic hanging over Silicon Valley. This is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it's why everyone is terrified of Google,' writes Stross. 'The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.'"
Ah, the smell of hyperbole in the morning....
I don't think the PC is going to meet its demise anytime in the foreseeable future. Microsoft dominates the business sector right now because it caters to businesses in a way Apple doesn't. Apple may take over the home user market, but until they convince businesses to adopt their ideologies PCs won't be dying anytime soon
Offer a phone with a USB port.
I hope this helps the bankruptcy of Apple.
Cheers.
Half of my users have trouble getting vpn protocols to work reliably over their isp links. ALL of my users complain loudly when things aren't fast and snappy. I would NEVER put any of these people 'on the cloud', considering one lost packet is enough to get them riled up. It's bad enough that they will complain about new emails not coming in....it would be worse if they can't get to ANY of them when their connection is down.
You can get a lot of power into very small notebooks now.....why go backwards back to a dumb terminal that is dependent upon overloaded Starbucks wifi in order to get ANY program to work?
Desktops may be dying out....but we're not switching the entire world to the cloud anytime soon.
- Eric
PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath
a sawed off shotgun, lots of ammo, and a Ford Falcon XB Interceptor
If you think Clarus is a misspelling of Claris, you REALLY, REALLY need to get the FUCK off my platform. RIGHT. NOW.
Sorry, but I've been around too long to buy it. I remember seeing Larry Ellison predict the end of the PC era just as it got going. Literally, I was in the audience, as he described how the NC (Network Computer for those that don't remember) would replace the PC. Conveniently, it was all driven by Oracle. No need for Apple, or Microsoft, or any of their nonsense anymore! And that was in 1998 I think... Remember 1998 folks? You were still using those clunky Netware networks - might have even been on Token Ring still, and you were excited by that new Windows 98 that was coming out that was FINALLY going to fix the problems with Windows 95... me, I was excited about that new fangled phone operating system... Palm OS.
Sorry... Saying that PC's are going to bite it because of the "cloud" is like saying that we have bullet trains now, so you no longer need your car.
(There's your car analogy for those looking for one)
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
LOL. End of PC era. Can I have what they're smoking? In a Smithsonian exhibit, I saw a graph of TV ownership in the US. It was a saturation curve, flattening out in the 1970s, IIRC. By then, most people had TVs, and it was just gap filling. I saw the PC ownership curve saturating in the late 90s. By PC, I mean Personal Computer, including Macs.
The point? Companies like Zenith and Sony made money long after the "TV revolution" was over. Better models, ergonomic features, add-ons, incremental refinements, solid state vs. tube, etc.
It's shortsighted to think that we aren't going to continue to have refinements in the PC other than Moore's law related speedups. No, companies like Intel won't be driving huge speculative bubbles anymore; but they won't be going bankrupt either. Just like TV makers, the differentiator will be how well they run their business. It'll be things like customer service, cashflow, etc. It'll be boring business stuff, sorry; but not the end of the world.
Oh, and f*** the cloud. You can have my hard drive when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. Actually, make that my affordable solid state drive. See? Plenty of refinements left in the pipeline.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I thought Apple's grudge against Flash was all about free Flash applications competing with it's own commercial apps from the App Store. Want your lame "fart button"? Just browse to www.fartbutton.com and have a field day for *free*; it's faster than a micro-transaction and less painful, especially when you have to justify to your spouse all those micro-purchases making a macro-dent on your income.
No Flash, no cool little applications on your Phone for free... your only source for a quick fix is the App Store.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
For the past 25 years we've seen these types of predictions. What's being said is nothing new. Just a new surface on an old polygon.
The industry has a long way to go before it is going to die. There's nothing Apple nor anyone else can do that will change things. The industry, in a way, is at fault for any problems being perceived. The constant niggling of customers by tiny incremental change leads customers to believe that there's nothing happening and thus their unwillingness to pay the price for the technology. Make big changes, some radical, such as from the command line to the GUI and we'll see another 50 years of growth in PC.
This is more feldercarb by some industry exhaust spewing waste into the ecosystem. They are just blowhards seeking to get you to think that this Apple product is the direction we'll be going. We do not run our computers for gaming, as gaming is secondary. We expect significantly more from our computers than a gaming console provides. We do not do serious productivity work on an iPad or gaming console.
And Moore's law has nothing to do with this. Everytime someone says Moore's law has come to an end we have another go at it.
I think what I'm reading are the younger generation that didn't see the world as it was back then, before computing was involved in every aspect of our lives. These people have a problem with their imagination and hence their mind is out of focus when it comes to innovation and technology. I'm certain this isn't quite like the music business where a friend said that the only reason music sucks today is because all the good music has already been made. It's really a lack of vision that drives one to conclude that these cobbled devices are technology's future. They are a just a crutch to innovation.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Let's assume we hit the absolute limit. We develop a lithography technique that is as small as possible, and there is no way to do anything on the quantum level. I'm not saying that is remotely likely, just assume. So what? That now means there no use for anything but an iPad? Hardly. While there's a wide variety of users for computers these days that require little power, there are plenty of other uses that require more power. Media creation would be a big one. People love to shoot, edit, and distribute video. Wonderful, but you need an ok system to do SD video, and you need a reasonably high end system to do HD. Video games would be another area. Those modern consoles, including the Wii, have some heavy hitting graphics hardware in them. Not the kind of thing you pack in an ultra mobile device.
In fact, if we hit the absolute limit of transistor size scaling, we'd then be at a point where the only way to get higher performance is larger chips, more processors, more power usage. It would in fact be a hindrance to portable devices. The mobile market we have today is possible only because we've been able to scale things down so well. The potential technologies that people talk about for the future in the mobile market will only be possible with more scaling. If we can't build smaller, more efficient chips, well then we'll just have to live with larger devices.
Also just because a market becomes saturated, doesn't mean there isn't money to be made in it. Sure, everyone who wants a PC owns one these days, more or less. It is even getting that way with laptops. So what? There's still a market. As an example, look at TVs. In America we hit TV saturation long, long ago. EVERYONE has a TV, even extremely poor families have a TV. What's more, you can now replace a TV with a tiny device. In theory, a smart phone could replace a TV. Doesn't matter, people don't want to watch TV on their smart phone, they want a 65" big screen TV. Doesn't matter that they could have it more mobile or in another device. They want a bigass TV, so they'll buy one.
Don't be ridiculous. Tower PCs are going to die, and we're all going to be using mobile devices in the future. When you go to work in an office, you won't be using a Dell in a tower case with a 24" monitor any more; you'll be answering your email, working on spreadsheets and documents, and doing CAD design or programming on a netbook with a 7" screen, or even a smartphone with an on-screen keyboard, or perhaps one of those virtual keyboards that are projected onto a desk. I predict full-size keyboards and monitors are going to be obsolete within 5 years.
Offices in the near future will be completely revolutionized by this mobile technology. Gone will be walled offices and cubicles, and instead people will come to work at offices which are just very large rooms which look much like cafeteria seating areas, where everyone can sit together at long tables, and do all their work on their smartphones, while being able to easily collaborate with each other, and anyone in the entire office. It's going to be amazing how much more productive everyone is in such an environment.
Oh... it's ending. I agree with the FA that the personal computer (PCs running Windows, Linux, MacOS) are gonna die out.
Slashdotters are bound to disagree with this for the same reason real geeks like me resisted mice back in the 80's. The command-line was the only way, because it was powerful and we had climbed the learning curve. X10 or X11 only had one purpose... more xterms on a bigger screen. We called Macs "MacinToys" because of their substandard hardware, no multi-tasking, and no command-line to get done what you really wanted it to do.
But all the time during early Windows and Macs, there was a feeling that faster hardware would make the GUI more palatable. And our art-school friends used Windows and Macs regardless, in spite of all the drawbacks we command-line geeks were so well aware of.
Fast-forward to today. Just about every Linux distro boots straight to a mouse-based desktop, and all the admin tools have a GUI. The GUI has won. We are happy to spin 90% of our CPU cycles just to paint the screen, because CPU cycles (and RAM! and storage!) are so damned abundant. Macs, Linux, now even Windows comes with a command-line shell, but how often do we actually use it? Really?
But all the other stuff we invested our time learning and mastering, like partitioning, directory structure, networking, defragging, anti-malware, plug-ins, superior 3d-party apps, maintenance, maintenance, all the other stuff we have to do for our grandma to keep her PC working ok are still around. Let's face it ladies, we spend (waste) a lot of time keeping our computers healthy and up-to-date. And we're smug about it.
The future is a computing platform free of all that shit, where all the skills we are so smug about are as obsolete as the command line. That's where Jobs and the iPad are going, and the market for problem-free, geek-free computing is hungry enough to pay a premium for it, even as PC hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, even as we complain about handing control over to Some Corporation. This market is sick and tired of always running to (or paying) people like us for help.
And that's the last frontier, the last bit of value-added left to the computer industry. Intel and the market flourished because MacOS and Windows never ran quite good enough with the CPU and memory available. Now, 3GHz 8-core CPU's with 4 GB RAM are really quite good enough (compare that to your... VAX). But to people who just want to get online or do word processing, there's still a lot of cruft to deal with.
Let's face it... we LIKE that cruft. We LOVE it. But it's also time-consuming, time spent downloading this and configuring that or installing just the right liquid-cooled heat exchanger and on and on until our dream PC is "just right". Jobs and Apple are out to hand out a machine that's "just right" out of the box. And they damn-well don't want third-party plug-ins like Flash i) requiring an extra step before you fully use the Internet, and ii) putting the platform at risk in case Adobe screws something up.
Perfect the turn-key computing device, and Jobs has good reason to believe people will hand over their money for years and years to come.
Because it's the maintenance-free, worry-free, geek-free, turn-the-key experience that Jobs thinks is where the money is. And he's right, just like he was right about the GUI. Geeks like us may want (and pay for) premium hardware, but we'll buy it from Newegg at the cheapest margins possible, and even still, our girlfriends will look up from their iPads with THAT look in their eyes and ask how much longer we're going to need getting our little do-it-urself project to the level Apple is selling out-of-the-box.
"But mine will be better, once I'm done...", we start to explain, thinking how "closed" and "restricted" that iPad is.
Talk to the hand. While she's Facebooking how immature we are to all her iPad friends, we're all hell-bound to end up like that grumpy old COBOL developer: "In my day, we wrote code in ed, one line at a time, 'cause we only had 1024K in the whole damned mainframe for 85 VT-100's across the whole campus... and we LOVED IT!"
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...