6 ms·

A couple of choice quotes: > PCs aren't going away any time soon, any more than faxes or mainframes did, but they are the past, not the future Faxes and mainf

by orf 11y ago

A couple of choice quotes: > PCs aren't going away any time soon, any more than faxes or mainframes did, but they are the past, not the future Faxes and mainframes faded into corners of businesses, and this is never going to happen with PCs. Sure, maybe desktops, but everybody I know has a laptop and uses them a lot for certain tasks (some of which have been superceded by their mobile, addmittedly). 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. PC's will evolve but saying they will fade away like faxes is a bit silly IMO. Phones are also newer, change faster and are replaced a lot (once a year/2 years) whereas a laptop lasts a lot longer and people are more resistant to upgrading (if it ain't broke don't fix it, which is something that doesn't seem to apply to buying new mobiles. Perhaps it's because moving PC's is a pain if you're not technical). > Windows had actually ceased to be the dominant development platform in the late 1990s with the rise of the web You should tell that to the endless numbers of of .NET developers (who didn't exist in the 1990's) and enterprises that run on Windows. Having apps run in your browser is cool, but a quick glance at my start menu shows a lot of non-web software, all developed for (and on) Windows.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
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).
- threeseed 11y ago
  > 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.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    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."
  - spiralpolitik 11y ago
    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.
    - aswanson 11y ago
      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!"
    - lewisl9029 11y ago
      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.
austenallred 11y ago
> 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.
- jerf 11y ago
  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.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    > 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.
kjksf 11y ago
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.
- AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
  Web and .NET are not mutually exclusive. If they were, C# would not be one of the most popular languages in the world.
msabalau 11y ago
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.
- quanticle 11y ago
  >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.
  - sospep 11y ago
    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.
    - norea-armozel 11y ago
      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.
- rhino369 11y ago
dwc 11y ago
> 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.
incompatible 11y ago
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.

by orf 11y ago

seanmcdirmid 11y ago

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).

threeseed 11y ago
> 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.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  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."
- spiralpolitik 11y ago
  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.
  - aswanson 11y ago
    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!"
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    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.

austenallred 11y ago

> 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.

jerf 11y ago
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.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > 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.

kjksf 11y ago

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.

AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
Web and .NET are not mutually exclusive. If they were, C# would not be one of the most popular languages in the world.

msabalau 11y ago

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.

quanticle 11y ago
>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.
- sospep 11y ago
  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.
  - norea-armozel 11y ago
    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.
rhino369 11y ago

dwc 11y ago

> 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.

incompatible 11y ago

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.