The PC’s Death Might Also Mean the Web’s Demise

* As the web gets faster and gains more capabilities, it will encompass everything apps currently consider their domain.

* By default it contains no gatekeepers, whereas apps on mobile devices primarily go through one central source. This carries with it safety, but also a higher barrier to entry: And generally, higher barrier to entry is something people are only willing to endure if given good reason to. Having the web replaced by apps doesn't leave any room for that.

* The web is open and universal. This gives it infinitely more resilience than apps- if Apple were to fall into the sea, an entire ecosystem would be lost. As is, the web practically guarantees nothing can ever die permanently.

About the only weak point that the web has, is that it's more difficult to effectively monetize one-time payments, but that's why everyone and their sister is going to subscription models, or are working within an established marketplace.

As a consumer with a high-spec PC with multiple large monitors, a good phone, and two tablets, I strongly prefer consuming all content on my PC. It's faster—by a massive margin, easier to navigate, easier to read, easier to simultaneously consume two or more content items (video + text content, for example), easier to pair consumption with production. It's better in every single content consumption metric that matters to me. It has a lot of room for improvement (see my previous rants about monitors), and I feel the lack of innovation in desktop computing is precisely why it's flagging. But that has more to deal with lack of innovation in desktop computing and less to do with mobile versus desktop.

As a producer, there is no comparison. In a pinch, I can produce work product on my Surface Pro or, in an even tighter pinch, on my Venue 8 Pro. But every moment I do so, I will be longing to be back home in front of my desktop computer. Unless of course I am on vacation in some beautiful environment.

Speaking of, I often feel there is a myopic view of computing that says mobile is workable for work production because the people making the decisions are those who can be mobile—they travel extensively and don't produce a whole lot. They may be creative, but they are not the creators. For the rest of us, we spend a lot of time at home or at an office, two locations where we easily can install high-performance desktop computing in one form or another.

Like others here, I don't care a whole lot precisely what is behind the screens, keyboard, mouse; behind the projectors, hand gesture inputs, and so on. I don't care if it's a PC in a big ATX case, a NUC or Brix, or a mobile device that I dock on a charging plate with wireless HDMI. What matters is that I can break free of its mobileness, making it a device with a large screen, a full-size keyboard, and a high-precision pointing device such as a mouse. That is desktop computing, and it will evolve.

Yeah, for me, I hope he is wrong because his model of computing is one that doesn't align with my preferences. Furthermore, in the computing model I long for, all my mobile devices become subservient to a singular "computer" that runs my applications. One of those applications will be a web browser.

Why? Simple: there's no way to properly distribute the truly vast array of unrelated information the web contains, via mobile apps. Nobody is going to want to download the thousands of mobile apps it would require to get comprehensive access to all that information at their finger tips. I'm not a huge fan of the mobile browsing experience, but I use Chrome constantly for stray information tasks on my S4.

How? Smart phones will be powerful enough to begin treating them like true home computers in the next five years. Some would argue they're already there. We're obviously going to replace the home PC + big screen with a smart phone + big screen, or equivalent. Android sticks and or a future more powerful Chromecast equivalent, five years from now, will be like plugging a desktop into your big screen. The same will be true for work monitors, eg. in a personal office. A $50 stick for your big TV in the living room, and maybe one for your work monitor, and optionally just use your smart phone. In this formulation, nothing changes in the home with regards to the web except the death of the PC as we know it today (powered by Windows), replaced by a better solution.

http://xkcd.com/605/

http://xkcd.com/1007/

Go to any coffee shop, or any workplace, and you'll see a sea of laptops. The PC isn't going anywhere. Neither is the web. The PC isn't even turning "niche". Tablets have their place, maybe purchased devices will settle down into a 50/50 or even 80/20 balance of tablets/laptops, but then it'll just stay there. Tons of people's jobs, tasks, and hobbies depend on full-fledged PC's -- normal everyday people I'm talking about.

The web, like pc's, is also not going to die anytime soon. Linking between apps is far too complicated, and finding things without Google would suck. If you know exactly what you are looking for, perhaps apps work for that. It is the equivalent of type in direct traffic though. Otherwise, you are going to google to find something specific, or twitter/facebook, to find something random. Each of those things require the linking of the internet. You may or may not use the built in browser much, but you will use the browser view in those apps to consume the content that is out there.

I disagree.

I'm still running the same Dell Precision T5400 workstation that I got back in early 2008'ish. It's got 2 x Xeon E5450's (3Ghz 4 core), 12GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS card and a pair of SSD's (these were a recent upgrade). In fact I have two of these boxes, the other has a single processor. The dual processor one I picked up for a song on ebay as a refurb. There's a lot of good solid refurb/second hand kit to be had out there still under warranty for peanuts. As a consumer, why buy new?

To this day it still runs Windows 7 (was Vista), VS2012, VirtualBox and a load of bloaty stuff without feeling slow. Hell I can even run four Eve clients at a decent quality across two 24" displays and the box doesn't feel sluggish, though my video card could probably do with an upgrade.

I have a tablet as well but I still prefer (as do many of my non-techy friends) doing serious work on a desktop.

The embedded tweet that says: "twitter will be for content. The web is going away because laptops and browsers are." is hilarious. Is all our content going to be in 140 character chunks? If not, in the absence of the web, how will a tweet link to content? That very tweet nicely illustrates the uselessness of a tweet to say anything of substance or with precision.

My experience has been like that. 20 (these number are very guessed) years ago, no one cared. 15 years ago people began to get interested. 10 years ago, everyone in my house had to have a PC. Now, most of us use tablets or phones, but we still have 2 PCs that get used when tablets are not appropriate. I personally use a PC 95% of the time. One of my kids who is a heavy gamer uses his PC 99% of the time. The rest of the house, however, use tablets 95% of the time. All those old PC are now gone. (Much better round the house now, less desk space and wire required. Mrs Me is now much happier!! Also, less power consumed. Less noise, less heat.)

The bit that bothers me is that back when all my kids used PCs, they nosed around the machine and discovered things like programming. Using a tablet is so focused, that natural discovery is lost. The tablet is just a thing they to use to consume. Another problem is that if a tablet user asks about how to program, they have to leave the tablet that they are used to and have to sit at this big PC box thing, which is for them a whole mental shift, and is there for possibly off putting.

But overall it seems to me that PC sales will and should decline in favour of tablets because PCs are OTT for the task of consuming the internet. Game wise, consoles are over all easier to use.

Using a PC is or was like using an aircraft carrier instead of a speed boat, until someone invented the speed boat. Now most people buy speed boats, and the navy can have their carriers back!!!!

PCs started as general-purpose computing for people who needed general-purpose computing. Now, 90%+ of PC users, if asked if they need general-purpose computing will go "Uh. Sure. Whatever."

The population of the open Web, with open standards, will shrink alongside the population of people who actually need a Personal Computer under their total and complete control.

90% of people want a game, a pop song, and a movie. And the publishers of those products don't want them to steal their products. Some of that 90% will break in the direction of open culture, on an open Web. But not most of them.

If you believe the desktop web is dead... Throw out all your desktops/ laptops and give everyone in your company iPads and see how productive your company is. It won't be pretty.

I've been reading about the death of the PC since the early 90's...and I'm still waiting for them to go Tango Uniform.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

Think of the most popular mobile apps. Do they have a web interface? Chances are, unless it is a game, the answer is probably yes. Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Google Maps, Pandora, YouTube, etc.

The Web is not going away. It's just becoming the default, lowest-common-denominator channel.

It does looks like the incentives are aligned in the direction laid out in the article. Companies can better control their user experience on mobile through uncrawlable apps. You hear "mobile first" a lot these days. These things are with users for longer than desktops/laptops. Anyone can carve out a section of the web where content gets created, but cannot be linked to.

The two gaps I see are -

a) mobile devices are good for _consumption_, but are not yet on par with *tops for _creation_, and

b) reputation systems on the internet (currently) require linking, and there's nothing to replace that in the mobile world.

Where's my standard, secure browser UI and API for secure payments using my credit card? We've been using the web to shop for 20 years and it still sucks.

Where's decent standard authentication worthy of this millennium, let alone this decade?

Why don't we yet have date picker and other form widgets that actually work across browsers?

Why are bespoke markup languages like MathML and SVG actually failing or seeing less and less adoption?

The web is more than websites. Personally I believe apps will be long gone before the web will be. It's already starting with the gazillion of apps you need to install these days with most of them that should just have been websites.

Its better to have a simple API for standard things that can work across platforms without coding multiple versions of the same application. We basically have that now in the web platform.

Its also better to be able to quickly load an application on demand. Again, we have that with the web platform.

Its better to have a straightforward way to look up information (Google, on the web) and to link between information and applications (the web).

What the web platform is missing is native performance and some (not all) native mobile capabilities like easy payments and application access. Its also missing some things like the security model of mobile applications.

The internet is an open system, but it is still using a centralizing client-server model.

What we need is something like the web/internet that is not server-based but data-oriented, peer to peer, and encrypted. Not centralized.

I believe that there are a number of technologies that could come together to merge all of the features we want into a new platform.

Whether we will actually end up with this idealized platform I don't know. I wouldn't assume that will happen. If I had resources I could try to push things in that direction.

The mainstream, browser-based web has been around for some 20 years now. I like the web, I use it everyday so I want to think it will last forever. But I wonder, were people saying the same things about BBS'es and AOL-like portals, or whatever came before them? I don't really know, as I was so young when these things were happening. All things must pass, right?

Mobile binaries written to a specific binary API will have a hard time competing with the web, because of its radical simplicity and backwards/forwards compatibility. Of course the web will change, but I don't think it has much to fear from binary applications (desktop or mobile) - we've been down that road before, and we know where it leads.

Platform independence is the web's most important feature, and as mobile ecosystems proliferate then consolidate, and hardware improves performance, I think we'll see consumers and producers reevaluating their choice to stay locked in to a world overseen by one corporate vendor.

Sales have reduced because - 1) Some tasks that never needed a PC people can do on other devices now. 2) People don't need to buy a new one every 18 months any more.

It's SALES of new PC that's have dropped, not the PC is dying. People still use their PCs... They just keep them for longer.

Ugh

Even if you discount the horrible fragmentation in mobile devices, and the difficulty this creates for developers to deploy apps, any apps, there still remains the sheer growth of the web.

"The Web", what is that? A simple answer is it's: The internet + a browswer. So is the internet going to die? Nope, that's growing every year, and a majority of the worlds population hasn't gotten in on it yet. Are browsers dying? Nope, any device imaginable these days comes with a browser. It's become unthinkable to make a device without a browser.

So if neither of those is dying, how come the web should be dying? Because Wired, that's why. It doesn't have to make sense, just has to be sensationalist enough to drive more web-views, how ironic, really, wired.

How having an OS that doesn't drain the life out of low wattage CPUs will kill the web I'm not sure. Mac and Windows have apps, but we still use the browser for a lot of things on those. (Linux sort of has apps)

TVs didn't kill talk radio, though radio may have shrunk.

The PC didn't kill TV, though TV may have been augmented, and perhaps shrunk.

Mobiles didn't kill PCs, though PC use may have shrunk.

This idea that the web will be completely replaced by Facebook and mobile apps is crazy. It's just another layer in a multi-technology world.

Yup, media people whose first and only personal contact with computing was a smart phone can buy into the idea that "The PC’s Death".

That's about as likely as a Tesla car putting SUVs, pickup trucks, delivery vans, 18 wheel trucks, and freight trains out of business.

A smart phone can't replace my PC, not nearly.

Let's see: 'Wired' is owned by Conde-Nast which also publishes, what, women's fashion magazines? Figures!

A PC bought now could last a decade for web browsing. When the number of decommissioned PCs start outpacing the total shipments - then it is time to worry.

Phones and glorified browsers will only ever be useful as dumb terminals (and the latter becomes a brick when away from a connection). Even if it goes back to the 90s where many people don't own a (real) computer, computers will still exist as many things aren't possible to do without one.

When there are compelling apps and net bandwidth that requires higher performing PCs, we'll see PC sales trend upwards again.

Only Windows laptop sales have declined, Apple had a big increase. Linux numbers aren't reported but wouldn't be representative anyway because it's usually forcibly bundled.

Nobody is going to miss desktop Windows. Except your corporate IT department, and maybe gamers.

Nowadays you can built cross compatible mobile and desktop web apps. Ones that are cutting edge.

We just released our streaming web app and launched it on iOS and any device running Chrome.

Further as an interactive/audience participation app it's much easier to get people to join/use your app via a URL then asking them to download an app. Here's some recent press if interested http://bit.ly/1l6QCoH.

Anyway this article's tone is a bit over the top.