6 ms·

The Rise and Fall of PC Platforms

38 points by e1ven 15y ago

kibwen 15y ago
Interesting, though I wish he had cited sources for his data. Also be sure to note that the vertical axis is a log scale, and that a more complete version of the chart is at the very bottom of the post. I'd be interested to see the historical sales figures on the server side as well, given the oft-cited dominance of Linux in server environments.
- utexaspunk 15y ago
  It would also be interesting to see figures for the number of machines in use by OS, instead of just sales by year. People replace their phones much more frequently than they do their PCs, but that doesn't mean they don't want their PCs or think that they can replace them with Android/iOS devices...
  - talmand 15y ago
    I agree, my current computer is three-to-four years old and I still use it on a daily basis. I've been through three phones in that amount of time. According to that logic I prefer my phone 3-to-1 over my computer yet if I had to choose I would drop the phone over the computer without thinking twice. Plus, do the numbers account for saturation of the marketplace? PCs have been around for quite a while, Android and iOS have a much shorter lifespan with sales that have not peaked. I ask because I didn't read the article fully since I tend to avoid pronouncements such as "this thing here is dead!" we get every couple of months. Talk to me when PC sales have been trending seriously downward for five-to-ten years and then we can discuss the death of the platform.
joebadmo 15y ago
Seems to me the upward trending platforms are all qualitatively different from the crashed ones in that they're not crystallized the way those earlier, more console-type ones were. So this visualization doesn't seem particularly illuminating to me.
CWuestefeld 15y ago
Horrible graphics. First, the stacked data scaled to a constant upper line creates the false impression that PCs are going away, but actually the total market for computing is exploding. Second, in the line charts, it's very difficult to discern which line is for which products.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Fall of PC platforms? I don't see any fall there, really, however much Horace wants it to be true. The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers. For example, take the mobile vs. desktop browsing metric from StatCounter. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201012-201112 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2010... The mobile share is barely inching up to 8% over the whole of 2011. That doesn't really show a fall of PC unless it's a headline from a site that has a reputation of twisting statistics to push its agenda.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  What else do you expect from Asymco and Horace? They predicted that Android would never take off like it did, The whole site seems to be predicated on telling Apple fans what they want to hear with a lot of twisted analysis. They're basically the inventor of the "profit derived" metric (by which IIS is totally dominating Apache/nginx in web servers). Of course the PC is dying according to them.
- TheCowboy 15y ago
  I also don't understand how he has PC has as its own category of data, yet separates out PCs such as the TRS-80. I can't look it up in Wikipedia, but I don't recall how the TRS-80 or other Tandy machines would not be categorized as PCs, even if they also carry the label of micro-computer. This comes off as another tired attempt to write yet another "The Death of" article that are common to talking heads. Except for older people who never had a chance to acquire the basic intuition to operate a PC, I'm not aware of anyone who does not own a PC and at least one or many other non-PC devices. I think it is best said that the PC market has simply matured.
  - Gormo 15y ago
    "PC" in this sense refers specifically to the hardware platform descended from the IBM-PC, and traditionally running some variant of DOS or Windows.
harshpotatoes 15y ago
I don't think it is appropriate to have the smartphones and tablets as a %market share competing against desktop platforms such as mac/pc. For one, while in general people either own a mac xor a pc, people in general don't own a smartphone xor a desktop (I assume). The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop. At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.
drblast 15y ago
Uggh. All this is is another reminder about how close Commodore Business Machines was in the mid-late 80's at revolutionizing the PC industry and how they then dorked it up inexplicably. Not seeing a whole lot of "falling" in the current PC industry, but then again a lot of companies in the early 80's were on top of the world.
brisance 15y ago
The article is not questioning the dominance of the current desktop computing paradigm. It is to illuminate the speed at which computing platforms can be displaced. The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers. PC sales have not been contributing much to the bottom lines of HP, Dell etc for many years now. In business, profit matters. Usage is indirectly useful if it leads to profits. This is the fundamental difference between the Apple and Google worldviews. The tl;dr summary is that computer makers have to sell many more PCs to come close to what Apple is making from the sale of each iPhone or iPad.

38 points by e1ven 15y ago

Interesting, though I wish he had cited sources for his data. Also be sure to note that the vertical axis is a log scale, and that a more complete version of the chart is at the very bottom of the post. I'd be interested to see the historical sales figures on the server side as well, given the oft-cited dominance of Linux in server environments.

utexaspunk 15y ago
It would also be interesting to see figures for the number of machines in use by OS, instead of just sales by year. People replace their phones much more frequently than they do their PCs, but that doesn't mean they don't want their PCs or think that they can replace them with Android/iOS devices...
- talmand 15y ago
  I agree, my current computer is three-to-four years old and I still use it on a daily basis. I've been through three phones in that amount of time. According to that logic I prefer my phone 3-to-1 over my computer yet if I had to choose I would drop the phone over the computer without thinking twice. Plus, do the numbers account for saturation of the marketplace? PCs have been around for quite a while, Android and iOS have a much shorter lifespan with sales that have not peaked. I ask because I didn't read the article fully since I tend to avoid pronouncements such as "this thing here is dead!" we get every couple of months. Talk to me when PC sales have been trending seriously downward for five-to-ten years and then we can discuss the death of the platform.

joebadmo 15y ago

Seems to me the upward trending platforms are all qualitatively different from the crashed ones in that they're not crystallized the way those earlier, more console-type ones were. So this visualization doesn't seem particularly illuminating to me.

CWuestefeld 15y ago

Horrible graphics. First, the stacked data scaled to a constant upper line creates the false impression that PCs are going away, but actually the total market for computing is exploding. Second, in the line charts, it's very difficult to discern which line is for which products.

recoiledsnake 15y ago

Fall of PC platforms? I don't see any fall there, really, however much Horace wants it to be true. The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers. For example, take the mobile vs. desktop browsing metric from StatCounter. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201012-201112 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2010... The mobile share is barely inching up to 8% over the whole of 2011. That doesn't really show a fall of PC unless it's a headline from a site that has a reputation of twisting statistics to push its agenda.

cooldeal 15y ago
What else do you expect from Asymco and Horace? They predicted that Android would never take off like it did, The whole site seems to be predicated on telling Apple fans what they want to hear with a lot of twisted analysis. They're basically the inventor of the "profit derived" metric (by which IIS is totally dominating Apache/nginx in web servers). Of course the PC is dying according to them.
TheCowboy 15y ago
I also don't understand how he has PC has as its own category of data, yet separates out PCs such as the TRS-80. I can't look it up in Wikipedia, but I don't recall how the TRS-80 or other Tandy machines would not be categorized as PCs, even if they also carry the label of micro-computer. This comes off as another tired attempt to write yet another "The Death of" article that are common to talking heads. Except for older people who never had a chance to acquire the basic intuition to operate a PC, I'm not aware of anyone who does not own a PC and at least one or many other non-PC devices. I think it is best said that the PC market has simply matured.
- Gormo 15y ago
  "PC" in this sense refers specifically to the hardware platform descended from the IBM-PC, and traditionally running some variant of DOS or Windows.

harshpotatoes 15y ago

I don't think it is appropriate to have the smartphones and tablets as a %market share competing against desktop platforms such as mac/pc. For one, while in general people either own a mac xor a pc, people in general don't own a smartphone xor a desktop (I assume). The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop. At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.

drblast 15y ago

Uggh. All this is is another reminder about how close Commodore Business Machines was in the mid-late 80's at revolutionizing the PC industry and how they then dorked it up inexplicably. Not seeing a whole lot of "falling" in the current PC industry, but then again a lot of companies in the early 80's were on top of the world.

brisance 15y ago

The article is not questioning the dominance of the current desktop computing paradigm. It is to illuminate the speed at which computing platforms can be displaced. The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers. PC sales have not been contributing much to the bottom lines of HP, Dell etc for many years now. In business, profit matters. Usage is indirectly useful if it leads to profits. This is the fundamental difference between the Apple and Google worldviews. The tl;dr summary is that computer makers have to sell many more PCs to come close to what Apple is making from the sale of each iPhone or iPad.