Bill Gates: the Traditional PC Is Changing

Billly Gates writes "Bill Gates, in an interview with Charlie Rose last night, defended the move to Metro-ize Windows 8 and focus solely on the tablet experience (here's the video — tablet talk starts around 28 minutes in). When asked how traditional PC users will react, he explained that the world is moving into tablets, and a new PC needs to have both experiences integrated together. Also, he defended the move to build the Surface while charging his competitors a bundle for Windows 8. He says users have access to both experiences, whether it is a signature Microsoft one, or from an OEM. Is the a sign the desktop is dead or dying?" Gates stopped short of saying the traditional PC is dead, but dodged direct questions about its future. This is a big change to the stance he has advocated in years past.

Comments

Apple?

[PPH]

I don't see Apple shoving a grand unified UI down the throats of its tablet, laptop, and desktop users. And I don't see Apple users complaining or getting confused by tablet gestures vs keyboard/mouse operations.

How about we just standardize on the iPod? Put one wheel on the front of everything and be done with it.

Re:Winning!

[PapayaSF]

Isn't it amazing how Microsoft seems to have been put on the defensive? What a change from not that long ago, They no longer seem to have much strategic vision, and just respond (usually poorly) to Apple's moves. How freaked out they must be now that the iPhone alone makes Apple more revenue and profit than all of Microsoft.

Re:Le sigh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile computing is the future

You say that like it's a bad thing.

It's not. You just gotta look at it right.

First, the rise of tablets and the decline of the traditional PC will if not kill Microsoft, at least knock it down to a shadow of its former self. They exist solely because of their monopoly in Windows, and Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Second, it's a Star Trek future! Your mobile device will fit in a shirt pocket. It will be able to feed you information through a glasses or even contact-lens HUD. When you need to enter a lot of information or use a large display, it will talk wirelessly to a keyboard and monitor... all from your shirt pocket! Voice commands will also improve beyond where Siri is now.

The very near future beings shirt-pocket computing more powerful than Star Trek tricorders and communicators. It frees us all from being bound to one spot in order to compute and game and browse.

The future is bright. Don't sound so glum bro! It's a true integration of computing and life, in a way we've never seen before. The next 10 years during this transition will be exciting indeed.

I am really glad there is linux.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

May be the PC is changing. And may be this is where money is and this is where highly amortized commodity mass market devices are heading. But I am glad our company kept linux support alive. Our product does heavy duty scientific computing and number crunching. Traditional mainframe/unix support was the mainstay. One by one our platform makers succumbed. Cray fell. Then SGI irix tru64. Then DEC alpha. Then HP-UX. Then Sun-Solaris. We were forced to switch to Windows as the main development environment. They took command line batch build away in Ms-Dev 4.0. We laboriously converted our nice Imakefiles and makefiles and home grown scripts that will build on PC from Imakefiles to vcproj files. Then they brought it back in Ms-Dev, but our Imakefiles and scripts were irrecoverably damaged. We were forced to use mainsoft for porting. Then mainsoft broke up with Microsoft. Some idiot in Remond thought "no executable is going to be built using more than 10000 source files!" And his monkey of a manager approved. Our builds broke.

Through it all we persevered. A few of us were preaching separating "GUI from kernel" "event driven code from procedural code". And we pulled extra hours to practice what we preached. Fellow developers from MS world randomly included afxwin.h deep inside non graphical kernel library code to add a one line debug statement, broke the linux builds and threw tantrums when called to fix the offending code, "it is working in Windows, so it can't be my problem. You fix it in Linux". We suffered all these indignities and got our product to build and run in Linux all the time. We no longer have a 3 month delay in releasing linux version.

Now this. Good riddance. Let the windows and its market dominance and its subsidizing the computing platform go chasing the tablets or whatever. Before Wintel monopoly we had 90% revenue fro unix sales, it dropped to 10% at the height, now linux is back up to 40%. If they cram the win-8 interface down the throat or make our software to be sold through appstore or something, our windows version sales will have no place to go but down. Finally sanity will return. We will separate content from presentation. We will separate gui code from non-graphical code. We will separate event driven code from procedure libraries. Vindication at last.