Whe Power users are going to be the 80 percent | Hacker News Reader

Whe Power users are going to be the 80 percent

christophh.net

6 pointsyuri416 comments

I disagree with his quote that 80% of people use computers for only web browsing, email,simple office work and to hear music and see videos. I don't know anybody for whom that is true.

80% of people use computers to do those things and one more little thing not covered on that list. And that one more thing is different for all of them. For some it's plotting courses for their next sailing trip, for some it's designing sewing patterns, for others it's some heavy obscure spreadsheet calculations or checking building plans in their GIS software and so forth and so on. Basically a tablet that only let you do web browsing, email,simple office work and hear music and see videos won't replace a computer for anybody.

First, a tablet doesn't let you just do those things.

I made the "80%" up, but the list should only capture what most of the people most of the time do with their computers. If you want to do the one more thing, there will always be more software for that, also for your tablet.

My point is that Tablets are the new _personal_ computer and what we knew as PC before is now going to be the _workstation_.

Well, you can’t do complex office tasks on tablets yet, I think. Anything that requires you to input a lot of text input still can't be done well on tablets. That includes any serious amount of writing.

Unless someone here already does their writing on tablets...

The iPad has Numbers and Pages for office software. It's written with the iPad in mind and allows for a great deal productivity.

Really. So you can write academic material on it, with the inclusion of bibliographic information? You can outline a novel and write it? You can create process documentation and tie it with graphing tools and charts and spreadsheets and tables?

Because I don't think your definition of "great deal of productivity" jives with mine...

I talked about simple office tasks like writing a letter, writing a CV, or a simple handout. These are all things that are at most one page, which can be done with a tablet without much pain.

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