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'Of Course We Are In a Post-PC World,' Says Ray Ozzie
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at a tech conference in Seattle this week, former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie had some interesting things to say about the state of the computing industry. 'People argue about "are we in a post-PC world?" Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world. That doesn't mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.' Ozzie also thinks Microsoft's future as a company is strongly tied to Windows 8's reception. 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future. ... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'"
of greasy fingerprints.
"Ozzie also thinks Microsoft's future as a company is strongly tied to Windows 8's reception."
They're doomed.
"If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future."
From what I've seen, people will not be flocking to Windows 8 of their own free will. But the "good" news is that their will has little to do with it. New computes will come with Windows 8, and no doubt there will be some software feature tie ins that will require it. Much like Vista and DirectX.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You can have my PC when you pry it out of my cold dead arms.
"If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future"
This man is a visionary!!! Ridiculous.....
In a world where there are no content creators, only consumers, sure. And maybe they hope for such a world. I've yet to write a book on my phone, though.
Ray Ozzie has always been good at restating the obvious, and in people paying more attention to his statements than they warrant because of who he is (or was).
Microsoft is still the power player when it comes to PCs, but it has yet to figure out how to become more than an afterthought when it comes to the devices people are using more and more instead of PCs.
On a side note - I'd venture to suggest that the Slashdot crowd as a group hasn't really come to terms with this sea change that's occurring in the world at large. My tech friends - and myself as well - still use a computer more than any post-PC device, while my non-tech friends are mostly on their phones or iPads during their off-work hours.
#DeleteChrome
I'm sure there's a way for you to just not use the sides of a 16:9 panel.
If a 16:9 panel costs less than the 4:3 that would fit inside it, what does it matter?
I seem to recall we saw this a while ago:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
Odd to hear it so clearly from MS now.
I've had a small epiphany.
I think the problem with Metro, is that I don't think that regular users think like Microsoft thinks they think.
nearly 30 years of GUI development and most everyone I know still uses full screen apps and a ridiculously cluttered desktop.
Don't get me wrong, I think on paper metro sounds amazing, especially with how apps interact with each other. Also on paper, iOS sounds completely fucking ridiculous, with just page after page of apps and no interaction.
However, what I find myself realizing is that metro isn't how people want to interact with computers. It doesn't offer any advantages over Windows Explorer. It's too high minded and over thought out.
It's going to bomb.
Badly.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Of course you can. Just don't be surprised if she looks for a new job afterward.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
MS may be right about the changes.
But what is unfortunate is that they're taking away all the hammers to make everything a screwdriver, instead of adding wrenches to the tool kit.
Check your premises.
I bought a new home last December. I got a pretty good deal, too, so there neener.
But the process wasn't as simple as it was back in 2005. I had to come up with income and asset verification, file forms online and offline for everything, answer questions at a moment's notice, exchange offers and counteroffers as we negotiated over details, accept an appraisal while I was driving home from work, etc.
My Android phone was all I had to work with. I could not create documents at work without having them signed from my employer. I couldn't send attachments via email. I couldn't go to several crucial websites. If not for the phone, I would not have been able to meet the deadlines.
For that period, my Android phone was a PC.
Now, if I bothered to work itout, a Bluetooth keyboard would make it 1000% better at that. And if I could jack it into a screen and an Ethernet jack, even better. That product is not very far in the future. The Transformer ain't it, quite, and the Motorola thing was too lame.
But it's coming. Then I have to ditch my little notebook. the all-in-one will do that fine.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
> 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future. ... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'
But... we're already doing that. Just not with Windows.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Let's move the goalpost on what a "post PC world" is so we can be right, shall we? . Before the NON-demise of the PC finally became evident even to the "thin client" recently turned "cloud computing " evangelists, they talked about the "post PC world" as one where desktop computers were gone and computing power and cycles were going to be "like electricity" just *there*, anywhere, at the flip of a switch along with all your data.
Just like with the history of electrical generation, we will move from the days of big machines being present in every home to centrally localized and managed computing.
Now that that pipe dream(or "tube dream" ala the late Sen Ted Stevens) has become self-evidently false, they' re moving the goalposts in order to be seen as having been right.
Now to live in a post-PC world is to "have other than PCs become at all popular" (though still not as popular as PCs) .
One supposes they are doing this so they can make the claim to their speaking engagement / consulting clients that "they're the person who predicted our post-PC world in 1999..."
Whatever.
You know what? The post-PC world will happen when a better experience than a great keyboard, a great pointing device and three large flat screens is available to interact with.
Until then, people who have to create on computers rather than just consume screens of information will keep buying and loving their PCs in this "post PC world."
Now if you want to talk about a post WINDOWS or post M$ world, then pull up a chair and we can have a civilized conversation....
My Model M is full of enough marijuana crumbs to get an elephant high.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of rolling this blunt.
There's so much nonsense there that doesn't have any actual content, it's all about semantics misunderstood.
"Post" implies that something has passed. Since PCs are still around, we're not in a "post-PC" era. It really is that simple. Don't let marketing speech and idiots looking for a soundbite mess with our language.
What these people are really meaning is that we are in an era where the PC is not the only computing option available anymore. But the invention of the automobile did not push us into a "post train era", because the two are not two things for doing the same thing. Trains are still around, even though we have other transport available.
PCs are likely to stay around, because mobile phones, tablets, embedded computers, etc. etc. all have their own niche and while some things that were only possible on a PC until recently are now possible on other devices as well, it's nonsense to talk about "post-PC". That's just a term some fucker came up looking for a headline that would stir people up and catch their interest. On the Internet we call these people trolls.
MS is worried and vocal about the whole thing because their ecosystem relies on the PC, and they missed the train (again). Apple never worried about which era they were in, they simply created something that people wanted. Maybe MS could try that approach for a change, build something that people really want, instead of building things they think are cool and then trying to force everyone to use it whether they want to or not.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Which are by and large the most important majority of the market.
No, they won't be in the future. Casual and social gaming get a lot of attention now because they grew fast recently. There's a lot of people who will pay small amounts to play light games that aren't very time intensive. That's what casual and social games are aimed at.
But there's a smaller group which will pay considerable sums of money, often over years to play far more complex and involved games. A mobile device can be supplement a PC (for example, if you need to make moves, monitor some activity in the game, or just want to say "hi"), but it can't replace a PC.
This goes for every other sort of activity. If you do light office activities, light art or music, light programming, etc, then you can get away with phone or tablet. Anything serious though requires more than what you can carry.
When processing power becomes largely irrelevant
Hasn't happened yet and probably won't ever happen. My take is that Moore's Law will run out of gas first.
The future "PC" will be more like a flat screen TV hanging on the wall that you walk up to and start interacting with.
What if you're sitting instead, which is what you're more likely to be doing? How do you interact then? It turns out that we already have the tools for such interaction now. My view is that we'll still have a need for specialized computing spaces because that's how we think and behave (and we don't like to be watched physically). And we'll want to have access to computing resources that are always available (connectivity to the outside world is a notorious problem even now) and over which we have control (legally, would you be willing to cough up thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per user to cover theft or loss of their data and work?). PCs provide that at a remarkably cheap price.
You will be able to stamp out 100,000 dumb terminals, which require far less power and maintenance, and far cheaper and easier to deal with than 100,000 full featured, self contained micro devices.
And they'll be more expensive because you only make 100,000 of them. It's worth remembering here that hundreds of millions of PCs are made per year. The only dumb terminals made in those sorts of quantities are smart phones. At this point, the obvious economic move is to make smart phones able to act as another interface to PCs.
My view is that for better and for worse, we're stuck with PCs for a while, just due to economic lock-in.
The one key enabling technology preventing this is the development of a good and powerful "web" platform that doesn't suck, i.e. NOT HTTP/HTML/AJAX/CSS/JS/WTF/OVR.
The fact that someone hasn't been able to come up with an improvement over that mess in the past twenty years should tell you something about how tough it is to change established infrastructure.
Or AutoCad, or a hundred other applications which could actually be 10x better on a touch screen than mouse/keyboard, when properly designed?
It could be, but it won't be. The only strength of a touch screen over regular PC interfaces is that it effectively has a built in stylus and tablet interface, though probably not one you care to drape a blueprint over (since you just covered the screen when you do that).
And this touch screen is going to need to be rather large, just to fit in the virtual keyboard and virtual mouse that you'll be using to do much of your CAD work. Heh, just kidding about the virtual mouse, not about the virtual keyboard though. That means the touch screen is at least 12 inches wide and able to be used near horizontally. You're in large tablet territory already. And you'll want to see the design at the same time in a different part of the screen while your keyboard is up.
The ugly truth is that mixing input and output devices as a touch screen does, is counterproductive for CAD and many other applications.