Lets get it right: PC sales are declining and tablets are hyped.
PC usage isn't declining. There is just no reason to upgrade any more. A bottom end PC from 2 years ago doesn't give you anything more than a brand new one. Our dev workstations are 3 years old and still spot on performance-wise.
Everyone I know with a tablet has a PC and uses it heavily. The tablets are but a small diversion.
However, that is until you realise that Microsoft actually got this when they designed Windows 8 and surface. They worked out how to provide one device which fills both niches. Now Windows 8 and surface aren't perfect, but they will become in time...
Then the PC is dead. Oh no it's not - it's a tablet shaped PC. Again it evolves...
Windows 8 is like a queen sacrifice. Windows knows it's burning its bridges, but forcing people to get used to Windows surface. People will hate it on the desktop (because change is bad), but pick a Windows tablet because they've already learnt (unwillingly) how to use it. I'm not saying it's a crap OS, just different. People hate different. Once they get used to it on their PC, it won't be different and they'll buy a Windows tablet.
Then Microsoft can roll back the interface on Windows 9 (making Metro a secondary interface), and corporate buyers will upgrade just to get away from Metro.
I don't understand you. You're here, on a board that regularly discusses, touts, and builds the bleeding edge, but here you are screaming form the rooftops that you hate change...
Tablets are over-hyped like PCs were over-hyped in the 90s. They are in the ascendency. Not because they're perfect for the work that most of us here on HN are doing/want to do, but because they're closer to perfect for the other 95% of humans. They lack many capabilities today that will limit them from being used in specific areas, but those reasons will dwindle over time.
Change simply for the sake of change, isn't good. However, as someone who loves technology, when I see family and friends successfully USING technology without fear of breaking things or feeling like an idiot? Using technology that brings joy? That is change worth supporting.
Take a look at the screenshot. 5 Office versions and there is no change. Everything works just how it did. I like this lack of change for the following reason:
Over the space of the last 15 years, I have actually had the chance to accumulate knowledge.
I'd like to see products like that which withstand that test of time, not fill up the world with short lived fads which result in the "XYZ is shutting down" posts you see here a lot recently. I don't want to have to throw my entire brain's contents out every few years.
The IT industry is the only industry which you can leave with less valuable knowledge than you started with.
The push of the bleeding edge now is churn, not progress. Name a single startup innovation in the last 10 years that isn't either a restrictive reinvention of something else or a landgrab or a lock in tool?
(insert a sarcastic comment on Facebook being akin to a Stasi database running on a Soviet clone of a VAX11/780...).
For reference, I work on a product which is nearly 20 years old now and we've slowly evolved it rather than come steaming on with all guns blazing with hype and ended up in the trash a year later.
Question: Why does it have to be a startup's innovation?
Entire applications now live inside websites. Perhaps you view that as 'lock in', however I can get all of mail out of gmail or dropbox.
The bloat of MS Office is certainly proof that change for the sake of change leads down a terrible path. However, without change, we'd all still be using the nokia 3210 instead of iPhones and iPads.
I understand your perspective, but I disagree that it's the right thing to do. Keeping Excel consistent over the last 15 years may be great for you you but it's terrible for, effectively, everyone else. Anyone learning MS Office for the first time will have to deal with outmoded interface paradigms, confusing icons, legacy feature cruft.
You should always be designing for your next customers, not your existing customers. Keeping legacy clients happy may make sense over the short term, but over the long term they'll slowly drag you down into irrelevancy.
No. The software you sold them should continue to work into the future. I'm saying you shouldn't be afraid to make improvements and leave people behind if they refuse to keep up.
Everyone I know with a tablet has a PC and uses it heavily. The tablets are but a small diversion.
My extended is full of uncles and aunts who use their tablet and iPhone significantly more than their PC. I myself spend much more time surfing and writing emails from my iPhone than my PC.
> Everyone I know with a tablet has a PC and uses it heavily.
Because everyone still has a pc, even if they bought it 5 years ago. As time goes on, we will see people ditching their PCs and just having a tablet. It is just about numbers.
I think the PC you are referring to is more close to the IHC he is talking about than his version of a PC. Remember the PC back in 1993 was two big gray boxes weighing 20kg each. Not a slim 13" macbook pro laptop.
More to the point, the PC of 1993 had almost all its data and functionality stored on its internal disk while a current PC relies far more on data and programs stored and running remotely. In 1993 we would be having this discussion through software written by AOL communicating with servers owned by AOL. If we decided to use software provided by different companies we'd not be able to even have a discussion.
Now, if I want to do something computationally heavy, I wish a computer (or a thousand of them) into existence, built from pieces I rent from a company such as Rackspace, HP or Amazon. My data, while existing locally, is also mirrored on several different places, accessible by almost any computing device connected to the internet, regardless of maker or software. Last time I lost a notebook computer, I was able to restart working on the next business day from the point I left (minus one commit I failed to do before leaving the office).
> PC usage isn't declining. There is just no reason to upgrade any more.
And there won't be a reason to replace them 5 years down the road. PCs (as in lots of local software and data) will continue to be used while they last, but not longer. They will be used for longer and longer, until they break. Then they will be recycled.
> Now Windows 8 and surface aren't perfect, but they will become in time...
Time is something they don't have. If Windows 8 fails to generate enough interest in new usage scenarios for PCs, others will remain dominant in the post-PC era. Microsoft's strength is the 90%+ market share in an important segment. Make that share small or that segment unimportant and Microsoft will, once again, be both micro and soft.
This article gets some things right but it gets plenty of them wrong. In particular, " Technically speaking, the industry is mired in hardware standards (Intel and Motorola CISC processors) with growth rates that are flattening out relative to the state of the art - just as the 360/3090 and VAX architectures did."
The Motorola 68k line really did reach the end of its rope in the 1990s and everybody from Sun to Apple to Amiga had to plan an exit strategy or go out of business.
The Intel x86, on the other hand, continues to outpace everything else on practical performance. ARM is coming on strong in tablets and smartphones, but overall, the x86 platform has lasted a long time.
Not long after he wrote this, IBM's System/360 architecture went through an amazing transformation that's kept it competitive.
From the beginning, the System/360 was based on bipolar logic that consumes much more power than the CMOS logic microprocessors are based on. In the early 90's, IBM realized that further development of bipolar logic was impossible because of power and heat dissipation issues.
IBM had to go to CMOS, but CMOS logic wasn't as fast as bipolar logic at the time, leaving IBM unable to produce mainframes as powerful as the last generation -- unable to handle the requirements of existing customers.
IBM's answer was "Parallel Sysplex", a clustering solution that presents a single-system image of a group of mainframes. With Parallel Sysplex, IBM produced microprocessor-based mainframe clusters that scaled beyond the last generation of bipolar mainframes.
Some architectures end up being dead ends, but if something is commercially successful, it's amazing how long it can sometimes be strung along.
Just curious: if the 68k series had had the same amount of resources put behind it as x86, there's no reason to think it wouldn't be similarly competitive today, is there? (Obviously this was historically impossible because nobody had the incentive that Intel/AMD have had, so I'm just asking from a technical standpoint.)
They expose the x86 instruction set externally for compatibility, but translate it to a different instruction set internally. It is conceivable that you could have instead translate 68k instructions and the rest of the CPU would have remained the same.
I think Motorola put their money behind PowerPC, a RISC architecture. I think it was a smart move on their part, because, while PPC didn't do so well on the desktop, it got into embedded products like video games and network hardware.
Today, the main CISC competitors to Intel are AMD and VIA, both who clone the Intel.
For a long time, the Motorola 68K family was ahead of Intel in every respect. What it didn't have was the whole PC industry depending on it and feeding it with endless financial resources.
You have to say why it will decline. You have to say whether it will be replaced, and if so by what. You have to present your reasoning and justify it.
Microsoft's then CTO presented his reasoning and justified it. So should you.
(And if you're going to whine that you were just making a joke? No. You were spewing a cheap little piece of cynicism.)
The memo is extremely vague about what it is predicting. It's basically agreeing with Sun ("the network is the computer" (c) 1984) / Larry Ellison ("Network Computer") / etc. - that something networked will outflank PCs.
But that's a prediction heavily dependent on timing (both those concepts failed to take off) and IMO misses what actually got the next generation of computing to take off (wireless networking, high-res screens and capacitive touch) and it also misses what is the main thrust of the next generation, mobility rather than connectedness.
He is right on target. Hindsight is 20/20, and it is an illusion that MS CTO had any deep insight.
People are predicting that mobile devices will be replaced by implants, or one of the many alternatives currently being prototyped, for reasons trivially linked to the relative strengths of the replacement. Check out Engadget and similar outlets for such predictions, they are dime a dozen. Imagine one of those articles nailing it; if you don't look at the other crap on Engadget, it will look like they actually knew what they were talking about.
Tablet is just a "smartphone" with a bigger screen. So it will be replaced by the "smartphone" when wireless display tech is both direction, i.e. display and input. In future, when I need to write/read a book, I bring out a foldable LCD display, "airplay" connect to it with my "smartphone" (Siri hit the screen please!). Or go to a meeting room with such screen, airplay to it to present my ideas. Or in StarBuck, pull out the LCD screen on the table, and airplay to it. Or the screen might have Kinect like sensor so I can interact with it like Minority Report. Or the screen might be by a corner of my glass (Google glass), so I can "airplay" to it. All this from my "smartphone" device hidden in my pocket. By then screen is needed less due to Siri version X, as most interaction and info search is by voice. For x-Apple people, just substitute Siri/AirPlay with similar tech names.
Hmmm ... This could be an interesting HN topic by itself. I think the most obvious answers are wearable computing, brain-machine interfaces (not implants) and vocal/sub-vocal input. Practical and common implants seem further than 15 years away to me.
Prescient visions of today's computing go back much farther than that, to the research of Alan Kay and others at PARC. I don't have the materials in front of me but my summary from memory is that they proposed the existence of small computers you would have with you at all times, which could access wireless networks. The small computers would use that access to retrieve information for their user, and to report location to an environment that would respond. It's not too far from what we have with smart phones now. And Alan Kay in particular conceived of a tablet computer very similar to the tablets we have today. I believe all this work was done in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, the dynabook concept was created by Kay in 1968. He claimed that the idea hit him when he was in a lecture by Gordon Moore explainig his law...you know the one...
Anyway, knowing something about exponentials he did some quick calculations and voilà, iPad, er, Dynabook.
Also, the Alto "PCs" that Xerox built during the 70ies, the ones with the bitmap display, mouse and Ethernet networking, were known as "Interim Dynabooks", so very consciously and deliberately approximations of the tablet computers to come.
Top brass at Microsoft have known for a long time that the PC will be replace by something more portable; Bill Gates has tried, and failed, to launch a tablet for a while now. What they got wrong was execution and execution is everything....
In 1998 non-PC or post-PC devices was "a next big thing".
I worked on a startup building corporate portal server software for non-PC devices like voice and WAP-enabled "smart"-phones.
Wrong timing.
Apple didn't hit it first time with Newton, but second time with iPhone and iPad was a big hit.
We started to see it more clearly with the first smartphones - much like the modem quickly became the most useful peripheral for my Apple II, even the slowest connection to a data network made PDAs much more useful and allowed them to become stand-alone, even if minimalistic, devices rather than what Microsoft then called "PC companions".
But predicting something without giving a timeframe is completely useless. Imagine if this had influenced Microsoft's strategy from 1993. They'd have missed out on the enormous influence of the PC, whose recent competitors such as tablets and smartphones have only really surfaced in the last 5 years.
Actually, Microsoft did move to the tablet before anyone else. They created a tablet version of Windows 10 years ago. Do you remember those? I had some friends who had those machines; mostly in the form of laptops that had a screen that would rotate into a tablet form factor, with a stylus for input.
Those were a market failure. It wasn't until Apple re-invented the tablet, and Android showed that there is actually a tablet market and not just an iPad market, that Microsoft re-entered the game with the Surface.
Yeah, I remember those machines and did even see one used in person once.
Aside from any Apple magic and all the associated style factors, I think technology was just not ready then; they were just a laptop with a reversible screen, which was too heavy and bulky to be used in the ways people actually want to use a tablet rather than a laptop. You might have gotten two hours of battery life, for the first week of its life. And the stylus wasn't exactly inspiring either - it smacked more of a way to easily translate mouse-driven software than the best way to interact with the device. That's a lot more obvious in hindsight, of course.
I believe they were reacting to competition, either the GridPad or the Momenta (I remember the Momenta getting lots of press for its innovative GUI - you can see it on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0XE08BjQDQ)
Tablets and PC will co-exist. You see, no one gets the fact that tablets are limited by their size. If you want to stuff in power, you are going to compromise on something, especially size, in this context.
Tablets are over-hyped and all they have is the cool factor. They are GREAT for consuming content, but not for producing them. And people who produce content are a huge majority. Let's take web developers and designers for example, I can't even imagine them (or me) working on their designs with 'an app' with a tablet. At least not until if it has a mouse; and if it has a mouse, it is automatically an evolution of the PC. There are so many many segments which the tablet can never fulfil. As a 3d artist, I can tell you how important the Graphics processor is to me, when I'm rendering my artwork. And rendering is not something instantaneous, depending on the complexity of the scene, it could take anywhere between a few seconds to a dozen hours to a couple of days for a single frame. And a remember, one second of a video (for film) has 24 frames. So I need to wait for 24frames*12hrs (assume 1 frame = 12 hrs avg.) to get one second of video rendered. And this is just one example I'm able to think of, but there are many many industries like Animation or 3d that are heavily dependent on PC's and tablets can NEVER replace them. Performance-centric industries are a huge portion of the PC market, until they make the transition to tablets (which is not in the near future), this tablet replacing PC's is just over-hyped BS that's a waste of everyone's time.
I for one would NEVER say the PC will be king, because it is more powerful. There's too many ways around the problem. First technology evolves. By 2020 your google glasses will probably be more powerful then the imac i'm currently using to type this comment. If you still don't have enough processing power, there's always the cloud. 5g will be just about ready, with speeds around 1Gbps a second, so bandwidth won't be a major issue either.
However, your point about screen size is really important. The major benefit a PC has today is the giant monitor that's attached to it. But let's look at mainframes. Its true giant IBM mainframes are still around today, but thats more of an issue of legacy software as opposed to hardware benefits. The trend for performing those same tasks today in new development seems to be hundreds of servers with commodity hardware running scalable software. The hardware changed, and the software changed to adapt to it.
I think that's a really interesting concept. The idea that the application will adapt to the hardware, instead of the hardware adapting to the application. While I feel more confortable with having a large monitor with a million graphical interface apps open at once, its not necessarily the best solution for productively producing new content. Google glasses for instance allow a glimpse into a possible future. What if instead of working at a desk doing 3D modeling with a mouse and computer, you used your hands to sculpt a model like it's clay with augmented reality? What if interfaces like Emotiv replace the need for a mouse?
Mainframes are also hundreds of computers running scalable software. The hardware facebook uses is not commodity - it's a stripped down PC. I think google still uses commodity PCs, but I suspect they alter the power system. The use of the PC is driven by the software, which originated on PCs running linux. They're not going to rewrite it all to run on a mainframe.
Regarding the "power" issue: iPads today are 1.x (1.4?) GHz Dual Core computing beasts with graphics coprocessor performance that's just amazing.
My NeXT Cube 2nd gen had a 25 MHz 68040, so even giving some slack that's a factor 40-50 slower, and it was not just OK as a content-creation machine, it was awesome.
When software is slow, it is usually the fault of the software, not a limitation of the hardware.
That doesn't mean that other cases don't exist, and rendering certainly sounds like one of them, but they are rare, and may then be better handled by remote server farms anyway.
I think the primary limiting factor of tablets is UI bandwidth. A large chunk of what people do with computers is select and modify. It's really hard to beat the mouse at the select step. Then there's the whole real keyboard thing. With a physical buttons you can be slightly off and get tactile feed back where as with on screen buttons you don't.
First of all, you can't use a Cintiq without a computer.
Secondly, when people say "great for consumption, bad for creation" they are referring to the design of tablet operating systems like iOS. Artists who use a Cintiq typically have multiple monitors and are multitasking with many different applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, ZBrush etc). This sort of workflow is just not possible on an iOS, WinRT or Android device.
I have a Cintiq, I always somehow end up using my PC, because I need to still use my mouse to get certain things done precisely (For example compound Boolean operations for Logo designing). But hey, yours is a very good point, but it is rather very specific to a certain type of artists (In my opinion).
the author writes: In his second last paragraph, Myhrvold predicts the winners will be those who "own the software standards on IHCs" ...
this is exactly why it has been so important that internet standards remain neutral, open, and free. without that, we'd truly be at the mercy of a single vendor (DEC, MSFT, etc) and you know what that stagnation looks like.
app stores are a risk of that alternative future (that honestly the phone companies also mapped out and drooled over, and slowly doled out with insane per-line item charges).
To me what Myhrvold is vaguely describing as the "IHC" in this memo seems more like a set-top box or game console than a phone or tablet. I think this may have influenced Microsoft's decision to pour resources into the Xbox starting in 2001. They got it right that there would be an "IHC" but misjudged what sort of thing it would be.
I think the PCs are in decline among lower-income individuals and working class people who don't need to read a lot or write a lot. They were never that popular a purchase in the first place, but because they never got deep into the games and computer culture, phone and tablet products are adequate for their needs, and have some advantages.
The main advantage is always-on mobile networking, so that sms, twitter, email, facebook, etc. are always available everywhere. It's also a phone and a camera.
The clearest evidence I have of this shift is observing coworkers who don't have internet at home, or lack a PC at home. They tend to run a lot more apps on their iphones and android phones. I'd say, typically, a dozen or more. The phone is their computer. They also are considering tablets.
Personally, I make data: text, code, graphics, and now videos etc. My PC is my primary platform. My satellite system is my netbook. My smartphone is a distant third. I have maybe eight apps on my two smartphones: This American Life, Facebook, Twitter, GasBuddy, LATimes (just a bookmark really), Google Maps (again, a bookmark), RedLaser, Cut the Rope, and some visual mandala thing.
I don't feel like I need a tablet. I'm probably going to get one, because I've been writing toy apps on android... but that's partly for my resume.
Tablets are just like video game consoles. They're going to be more popular than general purpose PCs and will be a huge market, for better or worse. The PC made a lot of people smarter. It taught people to control their computers, and even to program them. It created a culture of creativity. It was kind of like buying a car, and then finding there's a set of tools and a small machine shop in the trunk. We lose all of that with tablets.
A tablet is like a car with the hood bolted shut, and a gas cap that only lets you fill up at specific gas stations. It's fine for mechanics and the gas stations, but crap for drivers.
Mhyrvold's prediction wasn't quite right though.
Early demand was not for videophone. It was for sms and twitter and email. Low-bandwidth, immediate services. The killer video app is still video on demand. High costs for data impede some applications.
Price was not cheaper by an order of magnitude. It was around half, or a bit more than half.
Gaming has been consuming CPU so quickly that it became its own category of computer.
Gaming, videophone and phone have only started to work on the internet in the past five years or so. Network latency has been a problem.
How does it show any decline? PC market is stable and only grows. Especially in the corporate sphere. All this talk about tablets killing PC - is pure idiocy. Tablets are toys in comparison to PCs. Only when mobile computers will develop to be real PC alternatives (i.e. offering equivalently ergonomic user interfaces - hollographic and what not), one can start talking about them replacing PCs. While they use touchscreen input, they'll remain alongside PCs.
When people use less and less their PCs they are less inclined to buy newer ones in the future. When it's time to replace my mom's PC, I doubt she'll need more than a small HDMI plug sized Android device connected to a large screen.
Some people, who don't use computers extensively. But most - are using both, PCs and mobile computers. Current interface of mobile devices isn't comparable and can't possibly replace PC ergonomics (keyboard, monitor and etc.).
Real alternative would be some holographic interface that pops out in the air from a computer a size of a grain. That's an alternative to PC ergonomically. Not the current day tablets or handsets.
For many activities you don't need to replace PC ergonomics. Take store clerks for example: the work they do (looking up products, inventory, processing payments) can be done just as well or better using a touchscreen device with a specialized interface.
For some you don't need them, but for some they are a hard requirement. It means they aren't going to be replaced by tablets. Tablets can take some percentage of activities that used to be done on regular computers - that's true. But not all by any means. Therefore talks about "killing" - are not to the point. When some revolution in the interfaces will happen, and new methods will replace keyboards mouses and wide screens - then one can say the classic PC is obsolete. But that time is not here yet.
No, this can't replace keyboards and wide screens because of incomparable productivity. More like holographic screens and input devices which can take a size of a big monitor (or bigger) and offer convenient interaction methods, while not taking really any space.
A PC is not only about ergonomics - and Microsoft's strength is not based on that. It's based on computers with lots of Microsoft software installed that's tied to lots of locally stored data that make moving to a competing platform more difficult.
My mother has very little data on her computer and all of it could fit on a USB stick with ease. I'll bet she is closer to the typical PC user than anyone on HN and that is why PCs, as we know them, have very little future beyond a niche.
Key factor here is ergonomics of computer's interfaces that humans use. The size of the computer itself is much less relevant. It can be a desktop, a mobile computer, a super portable tiny computer. But the human interface is more or less of a constant, given that we, humans, tend to have certain physical parameters which aren't changing despite any technology advancing.
That's why computers with keyboards and wide screens aren't going anywhere, until other real alternative human interfaces will be developed. Touchscreens are good for what they do, but they are no substitute for keyboards, mouses and wide screens by any means.
Are you a writer creating your next magnum opus? Or student who rushes to finish some course work in time? Try doing it on the touchscreen. Are you creating some music or videos? You won't exchange your wide screen editor with tons of controls for any degraded touch screen experience. Are you a developer who uses IDE? Forget about touchcreen tablets - keyboards and monitors are your friends. Are you a hardcore gamer? You won't give up your keyboard and mouse and your high end GPU/CPU for any tablet for sure. And etc. and etc.
What I'm trying to say, is that tablets interfaces aren't replacing regular (i.e. classic PC) interfaces such as keyboards, mouses and wide screens. They are only complementing them. So all this talks about tablets killing PCs is nonsense.
Have you heard of iA Writer for the iPad? Many writers love it and favor it over a laptop keyboard. I also have hardcore-gamer friends who nowadays spend hours playing games on a touchscreen. I think you're being a little narrow-minded in thinking that a physical keyboard and a pointer device you hold in your hand are the holy grail of human interfaces.
Yeah, try playing some latest RPGs like Witcher 2 and etc. on a touch screen. Comments are welcome ;)
Those who need fast typing won't exchange keyboard for a touch screen ever. I didn't say touch screen isn't useful. But it's not a satisfactory replacement for older technologies like keyboards. It's just a useful addition. Replacements will come later.
PC usage isn't declining. There is just no reason to upgrade any more. A bottom end PC from 2 years ago doesn't give you anything more than a brand new one. Our dev workstations are 3 years old and still spot on performance-wise.
Everyone I know with a tablet has a PC and uses it heavily. The tablets are but a small diversion.
However, that is until you realise that Microsoft actually got this when they designed Windows 8 and surface. They worked out how to provide one device which fills both niches. Now Windows 8 and surface aren't perfect, but they will become in time...
Then the PC is dead. Oh no it's not - it's a tablet shaped PC. Again it evolves...