The decline of PCs and the rise of smartphones and tablets was predicted in 1993
dodgycoder.net
dodgycoder.net
PC usage isn't declining. There is just no reason to upgrade any more. A bottom end PC from 2 years ago doesn't give you anything more than a brand new one. Our dev workstations are 3 years old and still spot on performance-wise.
Everyone I know with a tablet has a PC and uses it heavily. The tablets are but a small diversion.
However, that is until you realise that Microsoft actually got this when they designed Windows 8 and surface. They worked out how to provide one device which fills both niches. Now Windows 8 and surface aren't perfect, but they will become in time...
Then the PC is dead. Oh no it's not - it's a tablet shaped PC. Again it evolves...
Then Microsoft can roll back the interface on Windows 9 (making Metro a secondary interface), and corporate buyers will upgrade just to get away from Metro.
My desktop, which still aims to be as NT4 like as possible: http://i.imgur.com/4fFLq.png
Added Excel 97 vs Excel 2010 for an interesting discussion point as well...
Tablets are over-hyped like PCs were over-hyped in the 90s. They are in the ascendency. Not because they're perfect for the work that most of us here on HN are doing/want to do, but because they're closer to perfect for the other 95% of humans. They lack many capabilities today that will limit them from being used in specific areas, but those reasons will dwindle over time.
Change simply for the sake of change, isn't good. However, as someone who loves technology, when I see family and friends successfully USING technology without fear of breaking things or feeling like an idiot? Using technology that brings joy? That is change worth supporting.
Take a look at the screenshot. 5 Office versions and there is no change. Everything works just how it did. I like this lack of change for the following reason:
Over the space of the last 15 years, I have actually had the chance to accumulate knowledge.
I'd like to see products like that which withstand that test of time, not fill up the world with short lived fads which result in the "XYZ is shutting down" posts you see here a lot recently. I don't want to have to throw my entire brain's contents out every few years.
The IT industry is the only industry which you can leave with less valuable knowledge than you started with.
The push of the bleeding edge now is churn, not progress. Name a single startup innovation in the last 10 years that isn't either a restrictive reinvention of something else or a landgrab or a lock in tool?
(insert a sarcastic comment on Facebook being akin to a Stasi database running on a Soviet clone of a VAX11/780...).
For reference, I work on a product which is nearly 20 years old now and we've slowly evolved it rather than come steaming on with all guns blazing with hype and ended up in the trash a year later.
Entire applications now live inside websites. Perhaps you view that as 'lock in', however I can get all of mail out of gmail or dropbox.
The bloat of MS Office is certainly proof that change for the sake of change leads down a terrible path. However, without change, we'd all still be using the nokia 3210 instead of iPhones and iPads.
Can you get all of your data out of Google's systems before they shut down your account randomly one day? That's a better question to ask?
I agree Office is bloated which is why I still use Excel 97 for a lot of things.
Regarding the 3210 point, if you look at most "Smartphones", the 3210 is a better phone. Better voice quality, longer battery life, more durable etc.
(Note: I have a spare 3310 I have lying around for emergencies which looks more tempting every day...)
You should always be designing for your next customers, not your existing customers. Keeping legacy clients happy may make sense over the short term, but over the long term they'll slowly drag you down into irrelevancy.
My extended is full of uncles and aunts who use their tablet and iPhone significantly more than their PC. I myself spend much more time surfing and writing emails from my iPhone than my PC.
Just another data point.
Because everyone still has a pc, even if they bought it 5 years ago. As time goes on, we will see people ditching their PCs and just having a tablet. It is just about numbers.
Now, if I want to do something computationally heavy, I wish a computer (or a thousand of them) into existence, built from pieces I rent from a company such as Rackspace, HP or Amazon. My data, while existing locally, is also mirrored on several different places, accessible by almost any computing device connected to the internet, regardless of maker or software. Last time I lost a notebook computer, I was able to restart working on the next business day from the point I left (minus one commit I failed to do before leaving the office).
This is not your 1993 PC.
> PC usage isn't declining. There is just no reason to upgrade any more.
And there won't be a reason to replace them 5 years down the road. PCs (as in lots of local software and data) will continue to be used while they last, but not longer. They will be used for longer and longer, until they break. Then they will be recycled.
> Now Windows 8 and surface aren't perfect, but they will become in time...
Time is something they don't have. If Windows 8 fails to generate enough interest in new usage scenarios for PCs, others will remain dominant in the post-PC era. Microsoft's strength is the 90%+ market share in an important segment. Make that share small or that segment unimportant and Microsoft will, once again, be both micro and soft.
The Motorola 68k line really did reach the end of its rope in the 1990s and everybody from Sun to Apple to Amiga had to plan an exit strategy or go out of business.
The Intel x86, on the other hand, continues to outpace everything else on practical performance. ARM is coming on strong in tablets and smartphones, but overall, the x86 platform has lasted a long time.
Not long after he wrote this, IBM's System/360 architecture went through an amazing transformation that's kept it competitive.
From the beginning, the System/360 was based on bipolar logic that consumes much more power than the CMOS logic microprocessors are based on. In the early 90's, IBM realized that further development of bipolar logic was impossible because of power and heat dissipation issues.
IBM had to go to CMOS, but CMOS logic wasn't as fast as bipolar logic at the time, leaving IBM unable to produce mainframes as powerful as the last generation -- unable to handle the requirements of existing customers.
IBM's answer was "Parallel Sysplex", a clustering solution that presents a single-system image of a group of mainframes. With Parallel Sysplex, IBM produced microprocessor-based mainframe clusters that scaled beyond the last generation of bipolar mainframes.
Some architectures end up being dead ends, but if something is commercially successful, it's amazing how long it can sometimes be strung along.
They expose the x86 instruction set externally for compatibility, but translate it to a different instruction set internally. It is conceivable that you could have instead translate 68k instructions and the rest of the CPU would have remained the same.
Today, the main CISC competitors to Intel are AMD and VIA, both who clone the Intel.
You have to say why it will decline. You have to say whether it will be replaced, and if so by what. You have to present your reasoning and justify it.
Microsoft's then CTO presented his reasoning and justified it. So should you.
(And if you're going to whine that you were just making a joke? No. You were spewing a cheap little piece of cynicism.)
But that's a prediction heavily dependent on timing (both those concepts failed to take off) and IMO misses what actually got the next generation of computing to take off (wireless networking, high-res screens and capacitive touch) and it also misses what is the main thrust of the next generation, mobility rather than connectedness.
People are predicting that mobile devices will be replaced by implants, or one of the many alternatives currently being prototyped, for reasons trivially linked to the relative strengths of the replacement. Check out Engadget and similar outlets for such predictions, they are dime a dozen. Imagine one of those articles nailing it; if you don't look at the other crap on Engadget, it will look like they actually knew what they were talking about.
Hence, no bullshit.
Anyway, knowing something about exponentials he did some quick calculations and voilà, iPad, er, Dynabook.
Also, the Alto "PCs" that Xerox built during the 70ies, the ones with the bitmap display, mouse and Ethernet networking, were known as "Interim Dynabooks", so very consciously and deliberately approximations of the tablet computers to come.
Wrong timing.
Apple didn't hit it first time with Newton, but second time with iPhone and iPad was a big hit.
Those were a market failure. It wasn't until Apple re-invented the tablet, and Android showed that there is actually a tablet market and not just an iPad market, that Microsoft re-entered the game with the Surface.
Aside from any Apple magic and all the associated style factors, I think technology was just not ready then; they were just a laptop with a reversible screen, which was too heavy and bulky to be used in the ways people actually want to use a tablet rather than a laptop. You might have gotten two hours of battery life, for the first week of its life. And the stylus wasn't exactly inspiring either - it smacked more of a way to easily translate mouse-driven software than the best way to interact with the device. That's a lot more obvious in hindsight, of course.
Tablets are over-hyped and all they have is the cool factor. They are GREAT for consuming content, but not for producing them. And people who produce content are a huge majority. Let's take web developers and designers for example, I can't even imagine them (or me) working on their designs with 'an app' with a tablet. At least not until if it has a mouse; and if it has a mouse, it is automatically an evolution of the PC. There are so many many segments which the tablet can never fulfil. As a 3d artist, I can tell you how important the Graphics processor is to me, when I'm rendering my artwork. And rendering is not something instantaneous, depending on the complexity of the scene, it could take anywhere between a few seconds to a dozen hours to a couple of days for a single frame. And a remember, one second of a video (for film) has 24 frames. So I need to wait for 24frames*12hrs (assume 1 frame = 12 hrs avg.) to get one second of video rendered. And this is just one example I'm able to think of, but there are many many industries like Animation or 3d that are heavily dependent on PC's and tablets can NEVER replace them. Performance-centric industries are a huge portion of the PC market, until they make the transition to tablets (which is not in the near future), this tablet replacing PC's is just over-hyped BS that's a waste of everyone's time.
However, your point about screen size is really important. The major benefit a PC has today is the giant monitor that's attached to it. But let's look at mainframes. Its true giant IBM mainframes are still around today, but thats more of an issue of legacy software as opposed to hardware benefits. The trend for performing those same tasks today in new development seems to be hundreds of servers with commodity hardware running scalable software. The hardware changed, and the software changed to adapt to it.
I think that's a really interesting concept. The idea that the application will adapt to the hardware, instead of the hardware adapting to the application. While I feel more confortable with having a large monitor with a million graphical interface apps open at once, its not necessarily the best solution for productively producing new content. Google glasses for instance allow a glimpse into a possible future. What if instead of working at a desk doing 3D modeling with a mouse and computer, you used your hands to sculpt a model like it's clay with augmented reality? What if interfaces like Emotiv replace the need for a mouse?
My NeXT Cube 2nd gen had a 25 MHz 68040, so even giving some slack that's a factor 40-50 slower, and it was not just OK as a content-creation machine, it was awesome.
When software is slow, it is usually the fault of the software, not a limitation of the hardware.
That doesn't mean that other cases don't exist, and rendering certainly sounds like one of them, but they are rare, and may then be better handled by remote server farms anyway.
The "great for consumption, bad for creation" line has become a bozo-bit flipper for me.
Secondly, when people say "great for consumption, bad for creation" they are referring to the design of tablet operating systems like iOS. Artists who use a Cintiq typically have multiple monitors and are multitasking with many different applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, ZBrush etc). This sort of workflow is just not possible on an iOS, WinRT or Android device.
this is exactly why it has been so important that internet standards remain neutral, open, and free. without that, we'd truly be at the mercy of a single vendor (DEC, MSFT, etc) and you know what that stagnation looks like.
app stores are a risk of that alternative future (that honestly the phone companies also mapped out and drooled over, and slowly doled out with insane per-line item charges).
The main advantage is always-on mobile networking, so that sms, twitter, email, facebook, etc. are always available everywhere. It's also a phone and a camera.
The clearest evidence I have of this shift is observing coworkers who don't have internet at home, or lack a PC at home. They tend to run a lot more apps on their iphones and android phones. I'd say, typically, a dozen or more. The phone is their computer. They also are considering tablets.
Personally, I make data: text, code, graphics, and now videos etc. My PC is my primary platform. My satellite system is my netbook. My smartphone is a distant third. I have maybe eight apps on my two smartphones: This American Life, Facebook, Twitter, GasBuddy, LATimes (just a bookmark really), Google Maps (again, a bookmark), RedLaser, Cut the Rope, and some visual mandala thing.
I don't feel like I need a tablet. I'm probably going to get one, because I've been writing toy apps on android... but that's partly for my resume.
Tablets are just like video game consoles. They're going to be more popular than general purpose PCs and will be a huge market, for better or worse. The PC made a lot of people smarter. It taught people to control their computers, and even to program them. It created a culture of creativity. It was kind of like buying a car, and then finding there's a set of tools and a small machine shop in the trunk. We lose all of that with tablets.
A tablet is like a car with the hood bolted shut, and a gas cap that only lets you fill up at specific gas stations. It's fine for mechanics and the gas stations, but crap for drivers.
Mhyrvold's prediction wasn't quite right though.
Early demand was not for videophone. It was for sms and twitter and email. Low-bandwidth, immediate services. The killer video app is still video on demand. High costs for data impede some applications.
Price was not cheaper by an order of magnitude. It was around half, or a bit more than half.
Gaming has been consuming CPU so quickly that it became its own category of computer.
Gaming, videophone and phone have only started to work on the internet in the past five years or so. Network latency has been a problem.
Many will enter, few will win.
http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/23/the-pc-market-overview-for-...
http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/12/is-the-ipad-a-pc/
http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/18/the-conditions-for-survival...
http://www.asymco.com/2012/07/04/the-building-and-dismantlin...
very interesting graphics. basically not a huge decline (some analysis suggests 2% decline IIRC) but certainly a halt to the growth.
asymco does some nice analysis based on filings by each company. very compelling, too.
Real alternative would be some holographic interface that pops out in the air from a computer a size of a grain. That's an alternative to PC ergonomically. Not the current day tablets or handsets.
Like multi-touch or gestures? That's exactly what's refreshing and great about tablets.
What I meant, is something along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKyQhriOrD0
My mother has very little data on her computer and all of it could fit on a USB stick with ease. I'll bet she is closer to the typical PC user than anyone on HN and that is why PCs, as we know them, have very little future beyond a niche.
That's why computers with keyboards and wide screens aren't going anywhere, until other real alternative human interfaces will be developed. Touchscreens are good for what they do, but they are no substitute for keyboards, mouses and wide screens by any means.
Are you a writer creating your next magnum opus? Or student who rushes to finish some course work in time? Try doing it on the touchscreen. Are you creating some music or videos? You won't exchange your wide screen editor with tons of controls for any degraded touch screen experience. Are you a developer who uses IDE? Forget about touchcreen tablets - keyboards and monitors are your friends. Are you a hardcore gamer? You won't give up your keyboard and mouse and your high end GPU/CPU for any tablet for sure. And etc. and etc.
What I'm trying to say, is that tablets interfaces aren't replacing regular (i.e. classic PC) interfaces such as keyboards, mouses and wide screens. They are only complementing them. So all this talks about tablets killing PCs is nonsense.
Those who need fast typing won't exchange keyboard for a touch screen ever. I didn't say touch screen isn't useful. But it's not a satisfactory replacement for older technologies like keyboards. It's just a useful addition. Replacements will come later.
Reference?