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Cringely is in the business of trying to look prophetic so he makes wild predictions like this to get attention. I don't think anyone, Apple included, things the Personal Computer is going anywhere for the very reasons you laid out above. Even with a wireless keyboard and a Monitor hooked up the iPad isn't sufficient for any serious writing, coding, photo editing, etc... You still need a PC for that.

I think Apple laid out its position very clearly yesterday. The PC isn't going away it's just being demoted. It isn't t he center of your digital universe anymore. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

You're exactly right -- Jobs said himself that PCs will be like trucks of the automobile universe and will always be around -- they just won't be used by as many people as often.

Here's the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Dlq4B56CI

Cringely is in the business of trying to look prophetic so he makes wild predictions like this to get attention.

Yeah, but in the long run, he may be right. Has peak Windows occurred? It's not quite clear, but it may have, with the total PC business going at -1% yoy. And when Windows/Office sales start showing big year over year declines, Microsoft will be hurting very badly, if they haven't developed some other revenue source.

Peak Windows? Huh? Noy even close.

The sales rate has reduced due to many reasons unrelated to Apple, saturation is high, repalcement rate is low because they are fast enough for many years etc. etc.

Measuring installed base makes more sense than pure sales. So the PC business going at -1% yoy is not really a good metric. MS is still making money hand over fist, look at their financials.

I mean, what do you use on a Mac to compose documents? Word.

No. I use Pages (part of Apple's iWork) for almost everything. If I need Word comparability, I open LibreOffice.

Given how seamless the iWork experience is becoming between iDevices (which will be including Macs), how much cheaper iWork is, and how much better the iWork user experience is (they don't have 20 years of feature-cruft littering the interface), there is absolutely no reason for a home Mac user to use Office and few reasons (usually an iron-fisted corporate IT group) for a corporate Mac user to use it.

Google Docs for me on OSX. The no-hassle availability anywhere without an install covers 95% of my document creation needs, the fact that everything's autosaved to the cloud and can be collaborated on, versioned, and exported keeps me coming back, and I don't have to worry about software version compatibility with anyone I share with which is a killer feature.

Anything that requires style or aesthetics gets drafted in Google Docs and then imported into Pages or Keynote for finishing touches, both of which are lightyears ahead of Word or Powerpoint in that regard (at least for 2007/Win 2008/OSX MS Office releases).

Google Docs is Office's closest competitor, but not outside individuals and small organizations, simply BECAUSE it's all stored on "the cloud". BitBucket and GitHub have the same problem. It's not that they're not good products, it's that there are many, many, many very large companies that want to keep their data to themselves.

And by the way, being "encrypted" on the cloud doesn't usually mean what most people seem to think it means. Example: http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/security/2295006...

No. I use Pages (part of Apple's iWork) for almost everything. If I need Word comparability, I open LibreOffice.

And if you need to do something remotely complex, neither works. Pages is decent for the very baseline word processing; OpenOffice is good for very little of anything.

The overwhelming majority of people use Office because what you call "cruft" is what other people call "important".

Overwhelming majority? I doubt it.

I have no doubt at all that there is a small minority of people who absolutely cannot do without some feature of Word that no competitor offers. But that’s a minority, not a majority.

The reason why I’m using Word, why my parents use Word, why my friends use Word (despite not needing any feature it has over Pages or OpenOffice) is that everyone else is using it. Importing and exporting from Pages or OpenOffice to Word is just no fun at all but necessary if you live in a world where everyone uses Word. I don’t want to run that particular type of gauntlet.

(I so enjoy all the times when I don’t depend on anyone else and can create a presentation with Keynote. It’s a dream. But an impractical dream if you are working together with people who use PowerPoint.)

I can't find the link offhand but I recall it being said by someone affiliated with Office that pretty much everyone uses about 20% of Word's features. The difference is in which 20%.

You might have a set of feature needs that Pages covers. I know that pretty much everyone in my company (that is, management and project people--engineers could get by with whatever, that's not a big deal) couldn't use Pages, and their needs are not extreme or out-there.

What you're talking about is the 80-20 rule: 80% of people only need 20% of the featureset.

It's an incidence of the Pareto Principle, and dates back to 1906.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

No, that's not what he's talking about.

I believe this is an article you were looking for (written by Joel Spolsky): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

The gist is that even though most people only use 20% of the features, everyone's 20% is a different set of features. So by creating a 'lite' version of your software, you actually end up alienating a lot of your users.

My experience the vast majority of the time trying to get people to change away from Word is not that Pages doesn't have the features they want, but that they have to learn a new way to do it in Pages.

This is not to discount that as a valid issue. Taking time to learn new software is time taken away from the real business of the company.

I think Apple could help itself by having a rather large "I used to use Word, how do I do XXX in Pages?" help section inside of Pages (and Numbers and Keynote, though Keynote probably needs it less).

This is an old concept that Microsoft themselves used in early version of Excel. I remember that there was a way to get early Excel to use the same commands as Lotus 1-2-3 which, I think, was the main spreadsheet application at the time. I'm going back 25 years though so apologies if my memory is not what it used to be!

I disagree. The usage of features in Word undoubtably follow the power law, so there is undoubtably somebody somewhere who does use any particular feature, but the vast majority of people don't use them.

Pages doesn't have all of the functions and if you can't live without a particular function, it is obviously not a good replacement. However, for the vast majority of users, it has all the functionality that they will ever need and then some, without worrying about getting lost in menus of functionality that they will never care about.

Someone said some time ago: all people use only 5% of Word features at a time - the problem is that these are DIFFERENT 5% for everybody.

I don't think Word is a best example for that. I'd say the wast wast majority of Word users use very basic features. I've seen my share of documents where spacing and centering was done using spaces…

I think we can all envisage a future where we are exclusively using web-based office suites on post-PC devices. A lot of people are already doing this.

What I can't imagine is a world where we are developing those web-based office suites on the same post-PC devices that they are deployed to.

Try and imagine using XCode on a tablet under iOS all day. Doesn't sound very appealing does it? Or autocad, or solidworks or arcGIS, or any number of other industrial applications.

For the PC to disappear, somebody is going to need to define a whole new category of much more powerful post-PC devices. I can envisage a superpowered tablet with a bluetooth keyboard that wirelessly links to any nearby display, but that doesn't sound very post-PC to me. And it doesn't answer the question of how to develop UIs for tasks of irreducible complexity without violating iOS's mandatory UX simplicity.

Try and imagine using XCode on a tablet under iOS all day. Doesn't sound very appealing does it?

No one needs to supplant the workstation form-factor. What we're in the process of is realizing that there are tons of other opportunities in mobile form factors. Try to think of all the workplace activities that involve taking down data on pieces of paper and taking them over to a computer where they get entered. Try to think of all the times when people read off information from a specialized instrument and enter it into a computer. All of these are opportunities for mobile computing.

Totally agreed, one of the biggest industrial users of tablets is in hospitals, which is exactly what you're talking about.

Lots of people do seem to think that workstations will be supplanted though. So much hype about the "death of the PC," the "post-PC era," although I accept that "post" doesnt necessarily imply a world where that thing is totally gone.

  > I don't see any indication that I'll be developing any
  > software on a mobile device any time soon

There is more to development than coding. See e.g. http://www.appcooker.com/

Very true! I like to have my documents on my own computer creating backups by myself. There might be people who like to have there documents in the clouds but others don't.

I'm an Ubuntu user and never used Ubuntu One.