BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

The PC Is Dead ... Again

This article is more than 10 years old.

This is my 100th post on Forbes.com.  The first was just over a year ago.  Its title was “Is The PC Dead?”

It got a tad more than 1,000 views and stayed close to my traditional area of expertise, the PC market.

The thesis was that PCs would represent a declining proportion of total “intelligent endpoints,” reaching 25% by 2015.

That forecast seems to be about on track.  Smartphones are becoming the norm in the phone business, and tablets (read: Apple's iPad) have done better than expected.

But we’ve been hearing a growing drumbeat about the “post-PC era” in recent weeks, and I thought I’d revisit the proposition once more.

People in our social networking epoch have the attention span of fleas.  In the developed world, particularly the media-oriented United States, attention has always been a rare quality, but it has been rattled even more of late, what with 500 channels of everything you could want and more, the infinity pool of the Internet, and all your cyber-friends crowding around you at every moment on your more-mobile-than-ever devices.  So, we might be forgiven for turning away from something that doesn’t move for, say, 45 seconds.

The PC?  That’s so, 1990s.  Who even cares?

However, the PC is not a thing in the usual sense.  It is a bundle of things.  It is most clearly identified with x86 processors from Intel and AMD and the Windows operating system from Microsoft.  But this bundle consists of layers of capabilities or functions: storage, memory, graphics, processing, input, display, communications, and odds and ends.

Both the PC and the arguably-post-PC form factors (i.e., smartphones, tablets) share many of these subsystems.  In fact, they are a reconstitution of their functions in slightly different ways.  For example, they all use memory, processing, graphics, display, and storage.

Where they differ most is in input, where Apple’s iOS product make a lot of use of touch, and PCs are oriented toward the keyboard and mouse.  But it is a spectrum, not an absolute.  The iOS devices have virtual keyboards, and touch is increasingly available in PCs and will become more so with Windows 8.

Thus, it might be more helpful to think about the world not in a binary PC/not-PC way, but as a constantly evolving set of capabilities that will be reconstituted into new systems in different ways.  The PC itself is not what it was 20 years ago.  Just think of an old Compaq desktop compared with the latest Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook.  A world of difference.

So, if it pleases the pundits to argue yet again about the longevity of the PC, they can certainly do so.  But the meat of the argument has to do with the fate of individual companies that have a stake in particular layers of the stack.  For example, it matters to Intel and AMD that ARM-based devices are seeing so much success.  And it matters to Microsoft that buyers are turning in ever greater numbers to OS X-, iOS-, and Android-based devices.

But at bottom, whatever you name it, this all is just the evolution of the personal computer, a smart device that a person uses to access information and communicate.

© 2012 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc.  All rights reserved.

Twitter: RogerKay