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I went on vacation last week and didn't bring a laptop at all...a tablet was good enough. At one time, that was unthinkable to me. My family members aren't upgrading their laptops because they never use them, while the PC was gotten rid of a long time ago for space. Of course, I'm a programmer, so having a laptop makes sense. I'm sure it will make sense to many people, just not everyone like before, and perhaps fewer and fewer people overtime. No one would say it is a growing market. And if you are a company like Microsoft that wants to grow, that's a problem (disclaimer: MS employee but talking for myself).

> No one would say it is a growing market.

Sure. But I disagree strongly that it is a significantly declining one.

Desktops no doubt are disappearing quickly in favour of laptops. But I fail to see how PC computing is going anywhere. Businesses still have 99% of their employees at a desk. People may not be writing Word documents as much anymore but they are interacting with complex web apps which are ill suited to phones/tablets.

IMHO we are moving to a mobile world. Not a purely phone/tablet world.

But there is no point in investing very much in a stagnate mature market to either maintain or disrupt it. So technology action will move elsewhere, like phone (which is almost mature, or cloud, which is still kind of young). Chromebooks were a pretty gutsy move by Google in this regard, but it was really just a services play for them.

People would often mis-understand post PC to mean "death of the PC" but really, it just meant "death of the interesting PC market where new money could be made."

I think we will see the traditional business desktop replaced with docking station with smartphone as processing unit. Ubuntu kind of had the right idea with the way Ubuntu phone morphed from a mobile oriented OS to a desktop oriented OS when plugged into dock, screen, and keyboard. For 99% of business uses this would be sufficient power. The remaining 1% would keep their traditional desktops.

I'm actually really surprised Apple hasn't gone down this road as it would be a really easy way to increase OS X market share if every iPhone suddenly became a Mac when plugged into a dock.

I think we will see the traditional business desktop replaced with a docking station and smartphones as processing unit Laughing. A buddy and I wanted to make a startup based on this back in 2006. "The Flip phone as a platform!"

This is what I want to see happen as well, but the software and the hardware just aren't there yet.

We don't have a well-polished OS that can seamlessly transition from a single-app-at-a-time smartphone UI to a simultaneous multi-app desktop UI depending on the size of the screens attached. Windows 10 comes close in terms of the transitions and polish, but only scales down to a tablet interface, rather than smartphone. The Ubuntu attempts at this just severely lack polish when trying to use it as a phone.

On the hardware side, ARM is too limiting in terms of software availability, and x86 just doesn't have anything that fits in a smartphone power envelop and can also handle a much heavier workload when used as a typical workstation.

We're seeing some rapid progress on both fronts though, so I'm hopeful it won't be too long before someone finds the right formula.

> But I disagree strongly that it is a significantly declining one.

...but it is declining. Thats what all the data and consumer reports show. Seasonally adjusted, taking windows 10 into account. The industry is slowing down.

Obviously we're not going to go 'mobile only' overnight, but here are the brutal facts:

- You make more money when you have a greater potential audience of buyers.

- Investors are not stupid. Investment capital will go where the users are going.

For developers and certain technical jobs some kind of desktop machine will probably always be a thing, but there are a lot of people out there finding they dont need a laptop. Even in business.

Windows is no longer 'the' platform.

Wanting something to be true doesnt make it true.

> There are just some things you can't do on a mobile - plug a HDMI cable into it, play half decent games, torrent, write your disseration

Yet. People said the same thing about PCs, and then about laptops.

And the answer is that in the future, "smart phone" will itself fade as a category and you'll have a smart phone that can be plugged in to a laptop body or desktop hardware for when you need the extra power. The body may also have additional processing power like a GPU, additional cores, etc, to turn it into a higher-class machine.

Due to the mobile form factor there are certain use cases that it simply can not fit while still being a "phone". This is not because the phone will lack processing power, it's literally because the form factor just can't have enough input & output options. Barring major battery upgrades, it also literally lacks the power to solve all problems. The extra hardware will also have laptop- or desktop-class heat dissipation capabilities, which a smart phone simply can not solve without, again, being something other than a phone when it's being a phone.

That is all to say, there are real and specific reasons that phones can't eat all the use cases the way minicomputers ate mainframes and desktops ate minicomputers. The only way for phones to eat all the use cases is to hybridize "back" a step and also become the things it is replacing again.

We've seen some abortive attempts at this. I find myself wondering if the fundamentally closed nature of the major phone operating systems is inhibiting the creation of this stuff, because the requisite OS changes to make this work are too hard. While I don't own one I still find myself rooting for the Firefox phone or the Ubuntu phone... they've still got a chance to beat the other guys to this market. And I for one would hate to sacrifice the openness of my entire computing stack because "the phone", which at this point will be little more than "one particular app", is closed. That's an awful lot to sacrifice to an increasingly minor use case.

> And the answer is that in the future, "smart phone" will itself fade as a category and you'll have a smart phone that can be plugged in to a laptop body or desktop hardware for when you need the extra power

And, funnily enough, Windows tablets can do that today, and the phones get it with Windows 10.

And you can find a few other things that go back three or four years; Acer had one, for instance. None of them seem to have quite stuck the landing yet. But I don't say this because I lack faith in the idea; I think it's inevitable. It's just that these things all seem to be ahead of the market. Now we just have to wait for the market to realize it wants this.

(It's hard to read the market's mind. But every once in a while, you can guess where it's going to go in advance... and get yourself brutally murdered in your financials when you show up to the party years before the money shows up.)

Back on the topic of the original article, it's possible this is Microsoft's core strategic play... if they agree with me that this is inevitable, they've still got the income and the OS resources to stick out the market's slowness, and build an incredible offering on this front out with all their resources. It's at least possible that they could indeed unseat an incumbent Android/Apple duopoly if they can be that much better than the competition once this use case becomes big... and it's not hard to imagine it going down that way. They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.

> They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.

Supporting older hardware, too. The fact every Windows 8 Nokia is getting a Win 8 upgrade contrasts pretty well with the way my Android 5 device won't be getting a patch for a critical security vulnerability.

Right now we call a tablet "mobile," but it seems to be to be more PC-like in function than mobile-phone-like (although more phone-like in form). There truly will be a blurring of the lines. It'll all just be some device that has computing power.

Laptops are a subclass of PCs. The microcomputer is by far the longest living of all generations, having survived through three decades.

Rob Landley once keenly noted the signature event that must occur for one computer generation to usurp another. It must become self-hosting, i.e. it must be able to compile itself. I cannot currently compile Android on Android or iOS on iOS.

> I cannot currently compile Android on Android or iOS on iOS.

You actually could, hypothetically, compile Android on Android, in a sense, by chrooting into a Debian environment and compiling from there. I've done at least the chroot part (I had a Debian chroot environment with Xfce installed on my Galaxy Tab 2 for quite a while, though it was really slow and limited by the tablet's measly RAM).

The idea of running a GNU/Linux-like system on Android (reusing the device's kernel in a chroot or a similar setup) is basically the idea behind the Ubuntu for Android concept that fizzled away as Ubuntu's mobile version started to be developed: plug your phone into a dock, and the Ubuntu chroot takes over the peripheral devices and presents a desktop.

That's cheating. I mean actually using vanilla Android as your host. Yours amounts to using a chrooted debootstrap for cross-compiling to an Android target.

Some call it "cheating", I call it "bending the rules".

The reality is that it's running on the Android device itself, using the device's own kernel. I personally think that qualifies in a technical sense.

> must occur for one computer generation to usurp another. It must become self-hosting

This is for completely superseding the previous generation. When the level of functionality of the new platform surpasses the needs of a all pure consumers, a general purpose computer will become a niche item, much like a Sony or Nintendo development system.

> Sure, maybe desktops, but everybody I know has a laptop and uses them a lot for certain tasks (some of which have been superceded by their mobile, addmittedly).

Exactly. Some few tasks have migrated to mobile, and more will follow. But not all, and probably not even most.

Also, the "desktop" I'm typing this on is a laptop plugged into an external monitor and keyboard. Most times it might as well be a desktop machine. A smaller screen and keyboard will never be as good as full sized ones.

There will be evolution of platforms, and migration of tasks to platforms that fit the task better. But I'm afraid that sitting at a desk and wanting full-sized, dedicated screens, keyboards and mice is going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Not because mobile isn't powerful enough or because the UI hasn't yet matured, but because sitting at a desk is a better fit for some tasks.

For every .net/desktop developer there are 100 developers doing web (front-end or backend). It was less than 100x in late 90s but it probably was more than 2x, even in those early days of the web.

And that's the difference between "dominant" and "growing".

Windows desktop development might have been still growing at the time but web was growing much faster and fairly quickly became dominant.

Web and .NET are not mutually exclusive. If they were, C# would not be one of the most popular languages in the world.

From a consumer perspective, it's unclear why a typical person needs a pc or laptop. For video content, a Chromecast is easier than fiddling with plugs and almost as cheap as an HDMI cable. A console provides a vastly superior gaming experience to a similarly priced laptop and almost no one needs to write a dissertation. And if you need to type at home for some reason, a $120 chromebook will do the job just fine--that may be a "laptop", but it's one that's worse than irrelevant to Microsoft.

And smartphones are better than PC in all sorts of ways. They can always be with you, they can function as a camera and video recorder directly, they aren't a box into which you need to figure out how to get your content into. They take up less space, and can easily be customized with cases for style and self expression.

Home computers started as a niche interest, and they'll return to that.

>From a consumer perspective, it's unclear why a typical person needs a pc or laptop.

Simple ergonomics. Forget dissertations, I get annoyed writing Hacker News comments on my phone. Technology may change, but human physiology doesn't, and until we get telepathic interfaces, a "human sized" interface is going to be most comfortable for any task that takes longer than a few minutes.

Try talking to it. Voice recognition is really good on most platforms today. I realize that its not always an option but can be very handy at times.

I tried doing that with a tumblr blog I have and it didn't work out. It's faster and easier to write by keyboard. Seriously, I can't see how anyone talks to a phone while trying to get their thoughts out. Correcting a sentence or copying/pasting a series of sentences is much easier with a mouse/keyboard combo than a touchscreen/voice combo.

It's most a form factor issue. People want phones that fit in their pocket or purse and they want something with a real physical keyboard and large screen for stuff like big emails, doing productivity stuff, couch surfing, etc.

Maybe the pc or laptop form factor will morph into a docking station for mobile device.

PC laptops are so damn cheap that cost isn't an issue for all but the poorest. Who already do use mobile only.

If you own a camera separate from your phone, the odds are good that you also want or need a PC/laptop to manage your photo collection.

I wrote the majority of my dissertation using Google Docs ... but switched to Word when I had to try and figure out the byzantine formatting required by my department.

The relevant question is whether Windows is being replaced by Android and IOS. There will probably still be a place for high-powered PCs that can't fit in the phone form-factor, even if the phone can connect to a better keyboard and display, but will people run Android on those high powered PCs, or remain locked in to Windows?

As a non-smartphone using Linux user, I'm just a spectator in all this.