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"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm, but as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, car

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm, but as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people." I don't see any moved goal posts.

aetherson 12y ago
I do. That quote doesn't just say that PC demand stagnates, it says it goes down, massively. It says that from X people who, at the time of that speech, use PC's, only 1 in the future use PC's. And we're seeing that's not true even if X=2. And X was never supposed to be as low as 2. What we are seeing is that a massive amount of computer USE moved over to phones and tablets -- tons of web browsing, tons of email browsing, calendaring, etc. Probably if you looked at the PC era and the post-PC era in terms of seconds in front of a screen or whatever instead of people, you'd see that 1/X ratio. But for people, it remains useful for almost everyone to have a PC -- even if they use that PC less than they used to.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Consumer PC demand has gone off a cliff in the last few years, to the chagrin of companies like Lenovo and HP. Corporate PC use has remained steady and even increased to pick up some of the slack (it helps that these are a bit more profitable than consumer sales). There is no point in upgrading a PC you hardly ever use, even if you don't toss it out altogether. Better to get a new iToy every one or two years instead.
vectorpush 12y ago
I don't think that the status quo matches that analogy. Close to 100% of tablet users are still PC users. Tablets are certainly more ubiquitous than ever before, but they're still mostly regarded as toys.

aetherson 12y ago

I do. That quote doesn't just say that PC demand stagnates, it says it goes down, massively. It says that from X people who, at the time of that speech, use PC's, only 1 in the future use PC's. And we're seeing that's not true even if X=2. And X was never supposed to be as low as 2. What we are seeing is that a massive amount of computer USE moved over to phones and tablets -- tons of web browsing, tons of email browsing, calendaring, etc. Probably if you looked at the PC era and the post-PC era in terms of seconds in front of a screen or whatever instead of people, you'd see that 1/X ratio. But for people, it remains useful for almost everyone to have a PC -- even if they use that PC less than they used to.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Consumer PC demand has gone off a cliff in the last few years, to the chagrin of companies like Lenovo and HP. Corporate PC use has remained steady and even increased to pick up some of the slack (it helps that these are a bit more profitable than consumer sales). There is no point in upgrading a PC you hardly ever use, even if you don't toss it out altogether. Better to get a new iToy every one or two years instead.

vectorpush 12y ago

I don't think that the status quo matches that analogy. Close to 100% of tablet users are still PC users. Tablets are certainly more ubiquitous than ever before, but they're still mostly regarded as toys.