Discussion on:

How to prepare for the end of the PC era

"The end of the PC era?" That's a heck of a big leap. Actually, it should come as no surprise that memory for mobile devices has eclipsed orders for PC memory (for now, at least). DDR3 has been out long enough for it to already be in place in the majority of desktop PCs. In other words, the initial sales have been made. Also, unlike mobile devices, that memory can be easily transferred to a new desktop. Let's also not forget that there are still plenty of people buying, for example, their first tablet. Most of the people who need a desktop for work already have them.

Leaving that argument aside, why would an increase in mobile device sales spell the end of the desktop "era" anyways? The devices meet different needs. I can assure you that I would much rather be typing these comments on this desktop than on any mobile device I own. The same most definitely goes for reports, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations... the list goes on for quite a while. If you want to truly see "end user revolt" then take away the desktops from your advertising department and make them create your company website, YouTube video ads, 15 sec television commercials, or even a full page ad in a newspaper with tablets and smart-phones.

However, since this is a least the quadrillionth article predicting the doom of the desktop by way of mobile device -- perhaps it is worth our time to ask why. I sure there is more than one reason, but I can't help but feel that the primary reason is that the people making the claims tend to be executives like yourselves. For chief executives, this transition might well be possible. But isn't that because you have people to perform for you those tasks I listed above? I am curious, though... have you done away with YOUR desktop?

Finally, about IT becoming the "dreaded dumb pipe." If your company has in-house IT, I would suggest that you take some time one day to hang out and see what it is that they really do. I notice from your company website that you have several business degrees. Of course, that does not mean that you weren't a "geek on the side," as so many of us were back in the day, but even then, there is an incredible difference between IT as a hobby and working in enterprise IT 60 hours a week. The years it takes learning bash scripts, advanced networking skills, the ins and outs of effective security, database management -- well, the list is enormous -- keep modern companies running.

I mention this because you speak of savvy users bypassing IT protocols on their mobile devices. You sure this is a good thing? Or even a thing that is 'going to happen so IT folks should just get use to it and get out of the way'? Is there any data that you don't want your competitors seeing? I bet there is and I know that there is for most companies. Who do you think keeps that from happening (most of the time) and how do you think we do it? Allowing "savvy users" with inherently insecure mobile devices (especially in their hands) to "actively circumvent policies to make their devices work on a corporate network" could bring your world crashing down in a bad way (read: lots of negative $$).

One of the problems is that "savvy users" tend to think that their knowledge of using applications and devices is the same knowledge possessed by IT professionals. Sign up to take the Security+ or CCNA exams in the next couple of weeks and you might be surprised (and these are easy ones, let me assure you). Seriously though -- learn a little about IT security and hang out on some of the security sites and you will quickly see what a nightmare this can be (pay special attention to articles on "island hopping" and "privilege escalation").

One lost smartphone or tablet from a savvy user that has "hacked" your company network could lead you to learn the true meaning of "hacked" in the hands of someone with a true IT skill set. Sometimes it pays (literally) to listen to what your IT professionals have to say.

There might be a reason for some of those IT policies

Cheers

I totally agree, Who are these people ?? They speak from "Fadology," not fact.

Couldn't agree with you more, it's disappointing for an IT executive to utter such an uninformed or unqualified assumption. This sounds more like predicting that robots will replace human beings!

has in hands on computer work and how much is from sitting behind a desk reading magazine articles while someone else did the work. I know of lots of IT managers who graduated from college / university and went into IT management without any work-face experience at all.

I have those robots...http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/ cute lil things.
Actually I use medium to heavy industrial 6+ axis robot arms all the time to automate tasks. My assessment of the best use of a robot is when the job is given as punishment to a human its perfect for a robot.

I agree with you there are smart robots and they can only get smarter. I have a problem when people predict that robots will replace human beings completely forgetting that these robots need programmers. I don't mean replacing human beings in terms of doing work that traditionally was done by human beings, that is eminent. I mean robots ruling the world!

that's what I used to do, and it was one of the best jobs I had. ROBOTS RULE!!!

nt

Why can't robots be programmers? They will have dumb robots and smart robots, with some serving grease (humans will no longer exist) in fast grease outfits and others writing code. I mean, where is this going - there are plenty of people to do our work overseas - so why not have a robot do ours? Now all we have to do is figure out how to get a paycheck!

That would take a flow chart and turn it into a crude form of COBOL, and then you would tweek it to run correctly. I'm sure their is much better science in that area now.

BWC has summed it up pretty well. I think the folks touting the "End" of the PC era don't really know what the word means or are using it wrong on purpose to bolster headlines and get clicks.

What we are seeing (and have been seeing well before the so-called mobile revolution came along) is the plateau of the PC era. Sales have been flat for a while. These days even a low-end machine has enormous computing power and can handle typical computing tasks with ease, and more importantly, will be able to for years to come. The days of having to buy new hardware every couple of years to keep up are over. The reduced need for hardware upgrades is one contributor to flat sales.

Another sign of the plateau is saturation. There is very nearly a computer in every house that can have one, worldwide. (Of course not everyone can have one, but that's another topic.) Every room in my house has a computer and some rooms have more than one. Although there are some bookshelf and laptops in the mix, most are desktops. I'm not sure where I would put another computer if I got one, so I'm about as saturated as they come. Hard to sell me something that I already have.

So there we have it. Some folks might be able to come up with a couple more contributing factors to the PC plateau, but I think these are the two biggies. It isn't like PC sales are going to stop, they just aren't growing anymore. Big difference.

You're right on target. Because of the storage capacity and speed,as well as monitor size, the PC is here to stay. It is just taking a back seat for now to the current trendy technologies of the smart phone, etc.

Me to ITguy tasked with investigating "Yeah just let me swamp your server with a Finite Element Analysis then flood the network with the output and struggle to animate the output on a 7" screen".

I think i may have better luck hooking up the hdmi port on a smart phone and doing the task.

I hear y'all who say sub-PC devices won't replace your PC any time soon; as a user, I'll still favor my dawn-of-7-era PC over such "toys". But as a PC builder and tech, I'm interested in the long view, and expect things to change.

Right now, sub-PCs remind me of the "home computer" era, before the ugliest hardware platform took over, benefitting as it did by an open hardware market where anyone could build interchangeable parts.

Like ye olde Atari, Amiga, Spectrum etc. they are tribal; you have to commit to Apple or BlackBerry or Android or Windows Mobile or Nokia, and having done so, are locked into that tribe's software and peripherals. And back in the home computer days, folks who made "real" computers (mainframes, UNIX minis) discounted the PC threat as being to weak to do more than act as a slightly less dumb terminal for the big iron of the day.

Right now, sub-PC devices are too costly to attract me away from desktop and laptop PCs. But if production volumes of these become the dog that wags the tail of component production, you can expect these to fall in cost, while PCs stay where they are - that, plus a Windows that favors the new devices, will see mobile PCs evolve towards the sub-PC in UI and hardware ergonomics. Once mass-produced tablets etc. offer greater economies of scale compared to PC components, this price gap will widen - possibly fueled by the "open hardware" effect of a Windows that will run on them (or maybe Android will do).

What I don't like, is having a communications vendor acting as a toll booth between me and my stuff (apps, data) "in the cloud". I also don't like the lack of hard boundaries that allow anyone with the magic password to wipe all your devices from the Internet, as happed to that Wired writer.

I think these figures are real and significant - I don't buy the notion that masses of folks are carrying over DDR3 RAM from old to new PCs. For one thing, PCs young enough to use DDR3 are prolly too new to be worth replacing yet; for a more obvious thing, very few people actually dig around at the component level or build their own PCs.

Other metrics to watch, are the shift in malware attention from PC to cross-platform surfaces (e.g. Java and Flash rather than Windows and IE), and the cost per Meg of comms bandwidth vs. local storage. The latter is illusionary, as bandwidth has to be consumed every time a file in "the cloud" has to be used, but a lot of folks will be too dim to notice that.

as my PC and as cheap as my PC or has a cheap and easy direct feed to the brain, then the mobile devices have not replaced the PC.

does that well enough for me. As to using wireless, well, there are NO wireless hotpoints in my town at all. The only wireless is where someone has attached a wireless router to the adsl modem. Then it's over 40 kms to the next town and any wireless access. Sure I could go with something like 3GL or 4GL cell wireless links, but the cost of that is about 5 times that of adsl and I ain't rich enough to pay that - we pay for ALL traffic down here and that ain't likely to change this century.

A Tablet is no more like a PC than the computer controller in your car is like a PC, it's a very limited computing device, just like the car and the DVD player, but does not have the versatility and capabilities of a PC.

A top end ultrabook or notebook can come close to the full capability of a PC, but no other mobile device can. Oh, yes you could set up some lightweight device that simply transfers data back to the Cloud service provider and let them do the processing, but that then gets you one HUGE bill for all the data transmission back and forth. In short, it's not a commercially viable option.

Right now the modern computers bottleneck is the hard drive.
According to Wiki, Sata 3 has a speed of about 600 megabytes per second.

If we instead remove all secondary storage from a computer and use the cloud instead, now your top speed is limited to your bandwidth.
In my case, my new speed would be painful, if I compiled a movie, it would upload at 60kilobytes per second, 10000 times slower than using local storage. If I wanted to edit it, it would download at 900kilobytes per second, around 600 times slower.
It would actually be faster to drive/fly to the cloud providers server with a USB stick and grab the file.


My math is probably wrong, but my conclusion isn't

We are going gigabyte speed in my area; will that beat Sata access at 6 Gb/s? I think so!

5% of the Australian landmass that has it, if that much. For most of the rest, we're lucky to get 512Mb/s most of the time, and many are lucky if they get 50 mbps.

No one wanted to build here so we started one of the first fiber networks way back when Sprint was renting backbone from us. It is an association owned by the public. Folks in Australia could probably do the same thing. We have a very sparse population here, but nobody minds paying for it ourselves.

I meant to end my previous remark with I DON'T think so!! But it is too late to cover up that mistake!

we probably could. It's legal to set up whatever you like on your own property, but there's all sorts of problems once you want to hook it up to the public network or run it over any public property.

that your country is so regulated. When we started our association, there was no internet, but the telcos needed high speed backbone through the center of the US, because our country is too big to economically spread the resources, we hired folks who were technically proficient, and they've had to learn a lot about FCC compliance, I'm sure, but in the interest of rural development, our government was willing to bend over backwards to get modern communications out to the sticks.

Our association has done so well, that it has bought out TCI, SWBP, and other big companies, that just didn't like the volume they were getting in the desert. That is just more gravy for us!

but we have less than 10% of your population and a much lower economic base. However, the legislation that's the problem goes back over a century to when the government decides to nationalise the telecommunications industry to be better able to control communications in an emergency - in those days it was only wireless and operator connected telephone. The laws have been amended slightly to suit changes since then, but they still retain overall control for the same basic reasons and because no bureaucrat will ever give up control on anything they have.

8 billion bits per second? I wanna live where you live.

Spouting stats and truths which are infact mis-informed and wrong.
But they can't be told, they have to learn.
Let them learn, we have.
They'll be back, give them their heady moment. Its quite funny to watch.

I wouldn't classify him as a know-it-all, nor would I claim he's perfect. Nor would I condemn somebody without first ensuring my grammar and spelling are perfect, that others do not dismiss me as careless in my work and therefore not qualified to judge.

There is strong differentiation between the office desktop PC and mobile devices in respect of the larger screen, 'real' keyboard, 7200 rpm hard drive and so on, but the hard drive is currently the serious weak spot for PCs that limits productivity (plus a few Win 7 bugs that no-one admits to). If desktop storage technology can actually move ahead in data rates possibly by much more extensive use of SSDs then the differentiation can continue and users can choose the best device for the job depending on the degree of mobility and security needed. Also someone mentioned that desktops are too expensive? No they aren't. Just have a look at the price of highly-performing mobile devices and the desktop with it's decent screen size can beat them in price/value.

mobile devices and PCs in a very positive manner.

I've got several spreadsheets that are wide enough to barely fit my 24" and 19" tandem monitor with multiple input and calculation cells to obtain the end results. I've opened them on my iPad and they're totally dysfunctional to attempt to use in a meeting. Yes the mobile devices are nice, but they'll not replace the desktop the way I use it!

....he'll wear the GoogleGoggles like everybody else who needs a portable, full-sized monitor on the go. Dontcha think? You may envy him his life-sized keyboard, though.

but if you recite it again you might believe it yourself

And more dumb ideas. Go figure, the two seem to be synonymous.

Chief Idiot Officer

It seems the higher you climb, the tendency is to move away from tech knowledge, and move towards business knowledge. If most of the job wasn't dealing with Business Politics, and bureaucracy, then maybe CIOs would be a go-to source for information. Sadly, that is not the case at all.

except swapping PCs or for mobile devices , never mind ones your employees just walked in with makes no business sense whatsoever, unless of course you have some vested interest in the tech...

... but VERY funny!!!

nt

I'm sure you are the Chief Information Officer for your organization, and I don't consider you an idiot! ! But then, you are probably CEO as well! Eh-wot?

That is Chief Sweeper and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, I do everything now and am a lot happy without no boss yelling at me or telling me to do illegal things.

I'm NOT going to use computers like this, ...

http://magisteria.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/scribe.gif

... period. It's clumsy, and non-ergonomic.

Retail, where the last thing you want is leaked payment card information because somebody's iPhone turned up in the wrong place.
The military, where the last thing you want is for classified information to be compromised because somebody's Galaxy showed up in the wrong place.
Medical, where the last thing you want is for medical records to become public knowledge because somebody's iPad showed up in the wrong place.
Financial, where the last thing you want is for executive salaries and bonuses to become public knowledge because...well, nobody likes the bankers anyway.

That's pretty much the American economy today, isn't it?

...is this article. Aside from one piece of advice, that IT touch base or something with new hires, it provides nothing of value. Even if I accept the premise that PCs are on the way out, this article in no way prepares me or offers suggestions to ease that transition.

Of course, the biggest thing standing in the way of any switch to mobile devices....is the true nature of the workforce at most companies. A small percentage of workers qualify for the moniker "mobile." Most are still chained to desks, because otherwise managers cannot see if they are doing any work. And, as long as they are largely chained to desks, you are going to have a hard time prying their keyboards and 19" (or larger) monitors away from them.

If you spend most of your time at a desk, why would you want to do your work on a 10" screen with touch, rather than on a 19" screen with a keyboard?

You wouldn't, and until this reality of the business world changes, there will be only small changes in the needs of businesses.

We may, and I repeat, MAY be the Post-PC era for home users, but we are far from being in a Post-PC at work era. This is why Dell, HP and Lenovo need to get on the tablet and smartphone gravy train, because they need to continue to make money while businesses buy PCs.

By the time we truly enter the Post-PC era, we will look back at the "Post-PC era" talk of the teens and laugh. The Post-PC era will be truly underway when we have something to replace the PC, and a 10" screen is not going to replace anything at work. Now, it could be tablets that dock into big monitors, I don't know. It might be thin clients that we use at work in conjunction with our tablets. There are many paths it can go, or some combination of all, but we aren't there yet.

when roll-up keyboards and monitors become common.