

The Rise and Fall of PC Platforms  - e1ven
http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-computing

======
brisance
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.

------
CWuestefeld
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.

------
harshpotatoes
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.

------
kibwen
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
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
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.

------
drblast
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.

------
joebadmo
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.

------
recoiledsnake
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-2010...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-
monthly-201012-201112)

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.

~~~
TheCowboy
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
"PC" in this sense refers specifically to the hardware platform descended from
the IBM-PC, and traditionally running some variant of DOS or Windows.

