> 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Sure, maybe desktops, but everybody I know has a laptop and uses them a lot for certain tasks (some of which have been superceded by their mobile, addmittedly).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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!"
> 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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Comparing phones and PCs is ridiculous. Comparing the sales rate of a new technology with the one of an old wildly different technology is jumping the shark. Or just sheer naivety.
Edit: Just noticed: The first graph also compares unit numbers instead of how many dollars changed hands, making it even more silly.
Also good to remember that PCs (desktops) and laptops are really good enough already. Nobody wants to replace them if they don't really need to.
My work laptop is 5 years old and still functions perfectly, and is about as powerful as new laptops. And I actually use the thing 8hrs a day so if there was something "better" I'd switch immediately.
So who really cares if kids need a new shiny phone every christmas to be hip? It's just a "gadget" for now.
Nowadays smart phones are getting LOTS of sales because the technology is evolving a lot and humanity as a whole is still "on-boarding". There's actually a reason to buy new ones every year as the new models are significantly different.
To continue to abuse that analogy, Trucks are probably selling better now than 20 years ago because they are "cheap" luxury cars. In this analogy, perhaps the "gamer PC" is the "truck" of the computer age?
Just so you know, trucks (F150, Silverado, RAM) have been consistently selling in the top 5 spots. The only 'car' sell at the top 5 is the Toyota Camry ;)
The analogy breaks, however, because PCs are considerably harder to operate and maintain than tablets and phones, whereas large SUVs are not significantly harder to drive than a large-ish car.
Phones and tablets may some day supplant the PC as the primary devices for consumption. But PCs are certainly not going to be replaced as the primary devices for creation. Moreover, almost every app you use on a phone or tablet and every web page you view is powered by a server on the other end, and those servers are going to be PCs for the foreseeable future. Phones don't replace PCs, phones create demand for servers that PCs can and will fulfill.
Editing pictures for facebook and creating comments in a forum are are not particularly "forms of creation". Photoshopping a magazine cover and building a website are.
As for photography, messaging, and gps. Well, of course. Those are a natural use for that form factor. I'm not going to take my laptop out to take a picture... (I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention that the phone is better for making phone calls too).
Sure. For a comment the size of a tweet, that's fine. I bet you're not writing long-form content on your phone, though. Or doing serious code development.
For some content creation, there's nothing that can replace a real keyboard and a real (large) screen.
Microsoft's strategy is quite clear. One Windows app, deployed everywhere with a focus on productivity and smart services. In no way has there been any capitulation. In fact Microsoft leads the space. Does Apple have universal apps ? No. Does Google ? No. And does Apple or Google have an equivalent to Azure's strategic analytics plays ? No.
The platform game is not short term. And I would be turning my attention to Google who look in far worse shape long term. They are still very much an advertising company dependent on search revenues. And they haven't demonstrated much ability to expand into other markets.
> One Windows app, deployed everywhere with a focus on productivity and smart services. In no way has there been any capitulation. In fact Microsoft leads the space. Does Apple have universal apps ?
The value of universal apps are debatable, but let's say Microsoft does rule that space. When $some_crazy_high_percentage of delivered phones are android and iOS, the market has spoken - people dont' care about running the same app on their phone and their desktop. Even if Microsoft successfully makes a shift to offering their app development platform on iOS and Android, they're now doing that from a position of weakness. There's certainly money to be made there, but its the difference between a serf and a lord. Microsoft is the lord of its own domain when they control the phone platform, and is a serf in Apple's.
But then you switch to something else:
> And does Apple or Google have an equivalent to Azure's strategic analytics plays ? No.
But that's an entirely different rodeo than the whole thrust of the article, which is the declining dominance of the PC and Microsoft's lack of success in the mobile space. Apple doesn't even care about the enterprise computing space from that perspective, and Amazon absolutely does want to offer those analytics - it's an entirely different set of competitors.
So, sure, yes, Microsoft is doing cool stuff with Azure, which is great, maybe that's the future of the business. But that's a very different business than owning 90-something percent of the software powering every personal computing device in the world.
> So, sure, yes, Microsoft is doing cool stuff with Azure, which is great, maybe that's the future of the business. But that's a very different business than owning 90-something percent of the software powering every personal computing device in the world.
Is it? Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services.
> Phones and cloud services aren't in competition, they're complimentary services -- phones create demand for cloud services.
Sure, from the standpoint that devices create demand for computing services, which these days are delivered via the cloud. But there's a lot less of an inherent advantage that Microsoft has in that environment.
On top of that, the money to be made is a lot lower. Let's throw out a scenario here - Microsoft trades its OS dominance for a dominance in cloud computing. They lose all of their OS revenue (unlikely to happen) in exchange for having a huge chunk of the cloud computing market (also unlikely to happen).
If we model this out - Amazon AWS in 2015 will make roughly $6b in revenue, which is about 10% of the total public cloud market in 2015 according to IDC In 2018, this market is supposed to be 128b. Let's say that Microsoft in 2018 has 2x Amazon's current market share, which would be a huge success by any measure, that gives them ~$24b in revenue.
Which is half of what they made in business software licensing in 2014. Half. They made 40 billion just on the business licensing end of their traditional software business.
I fully believe Microsoft will continue to live and innovate and potentially succeed in this brave new world, but it will do so at a huge long-term impact to its revenue and size.
Universal apps, seriously? Ever tried to write anything apart of a hello world example as a Universal app? Universal apps are a even more half baked pipe dream than all the other abandoned MS frameworks.
Honestly, I don't think he gets that smart phones as they are now are not going to replace the PC form factor. Until a smart phone can be plugged into a docking station with a keyboard, the smart phone will be a limited data consuming (not creating) device. For example, you won't be watching TV or first run movies on a phone's screen (seriously, who the hell would?). But you can tap out a message for twitter or facebook on a phone. Phones fit those situations and I honestly love mine for navigation. Beyond that, if I want to play a game or watch a tv show or write up a lengthy comment on HN then I'm going to use a PC or a laptop since those form factors are much easier to use for those purposes.
If windows continuum is well designed, I believe this could be a trend reversal. Lot's of people need a laptop/pc beause you simply cant produce good work with a tablet. But lots of people want just one device.
Can't believe he's using Uber as an app that's not on PCs but smartphones, because I want to pull out my laptop to hail a car.. And those other examples like Pinterest, Instacart and Instagram are pretty silly too, don't people just use their browsers?
That's the point. Those apps will never make sense on a desktop and just drives home the point that touting universal apps & easy porting of mobile apps to desktop is pointless.
This is a great summary of tech history and where Microsoft went wrong. If this one article could be sent back in time 15 years Bill Gates could have doubled his net worth by now.
There's no doubt that Microsoft has lost the mobile platform and the value of Windows has declined. But still, I'm much more optimistic than Evans about the future value of Office - it's quite possible that in 30 years most enterprise businesses will still buy an Office subscription as standard. Just as Apple creams almost all smartphone profits despite a 15% market share, so Microsoft can get outsize profit for productivity apps by concentrating on enterprise businesses.
The "Big 4" Technology Companies: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon all have their primary business models around targeting consumers of which the trend is that more of them are turning towards using Internet-capable mobile devices as their preferred computing device. This isn't a hypothetical trend far off into the future, Apple is already the largest company in the world because of its success and focus on non-PC devices.
This is why Devices vs PC Market share is very relevant for gauging Company trajectories, the gateway to consumers is moving "Post-PC" to Internet Devices where those with business models that benefit from a strong mobile presence are set to prosper in future.
With Microsoft's flailing Windows Phone and Surface their grip on consumer mind-share is steadily declining, they've still got Office to target end-users but even this is focused on Business users whilst Xbox and Minecraft targets gamers. Skype's a popular App that they may be able to do something with, but ultimately it's just an App on a much larger Mobile ecosystem.
Their Azure cloud platform does benefit from Companies hosting their Mobile Web Service on Azure and Windows/SQL Server Licenses so they'll have a healthy income for many years to come, but unless they have a prosperous mobile strategy they're going to miss the next lucrative computing platform which will affect their mindshare with Consumers and overall growth vs the Big 4.
> 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.