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Has the PC had its day?

IBM exec claims PCs are headed the same way as typewriters.

By Stewart Mitchell, 12 Aug 2011 at 14:44

It's 30 years since the first IBM PC was launched and an executive who worked on the innovation has claimed the format is heading the same way as the typewriter.

Mark Dean, chief technology officer at IBM in the Middle East and Asia said IBM was right to leave the PC industry in 2005, when it sold out to Lenovo. He added the world was heading into a post-PC era.

“It’s amazing to me to think that 12 August marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer,” Dean said on IBM's Smarter Planet blog.

“The announcement helped launch a phenomenon that changed the way we work, play and communicate. Little did we expect to create an industry that ultimately peaked at more than 300 million unit sales per year.”

While PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing.

But according to Dean, the arrival of tablets, smartphones and cloud computing means the writing is on the wall for the PC, although he admitted they would still hold strong in many industries – for now.

“I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well - my primary computer now is a tablet,” Dean said. “When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline.

"But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.”

Dean claimed that hardware and access devices were becoming less important as consumers focused more on how technology linked people, rather than on silicon itself.

“PCs are being replaced at the centre of computing not by another type of device, though there’s plenty of excitement about smartphones and tablets,” he said.

“These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices, but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives.”

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4 comments

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Not any time soon

Yes, tablets are getting popular, but will never replace my PC. I see tablets as just a replacement for Laptops, I don't use a laptop, too small, too fragile and under powered.
My PC is used for electronic design, also a bit of gaming.
It will take a long time to kill off the PC, with it's inherent flexibility, plus, I like to build my own pc's to suit my needs, currently my latest build is intel i7 980X based, 12GB mem, 2x SSD's, with a win7 boot-time of 10 secs. 6 cores (12 logical) works great for video conversion and processing, all cores used, I don't see anything out there that will compete with a DIY custom pc.
Steve

By HeliEye on Tuesday Aug 16

generalizing from one's personal

experience has its pitfalls, and the experience of an IBM CTO is a bit diferent from that of the rest of us. How does he spend his business day? Communicating, reading, and marking up reports. A tablet is great for that.

I would assume that all of the reports he reads are typed on physical keyboards. And that his successor would be able to say the same thing.

Productivity users need a physical keyboard (YOU try composing 50 pages of anything with a virtual keyboard) and a NON-touchscreen pointing device, especially if one is working on a graphic. Non-touchscreen because it's really hard to do fine cursor control when the cursor is by definition covered with your finger.

That means netbook, notebook, laptop, desktop. People trying to do serious productivity on a tablet add external keyboards, mice, and monitors. By the time one has added all that junk to an iPad, one has a very expensive netbook that has to be reassembled piece by piece whenever one actually goes to work. A netbook ... close the lid and go.

I can imagine the desktop becoming an increasingly small niche, the average user doesn't take advantage of the flexibility, the average desktop won't have the case open except for repairs and will go to the landfill unchanged from its original configuration. It doesn't have to be that way. My 1999 minitower is still going strong. As a quad core SSD Linux box with 1T (original config: K6-350 / 256M / 6G HD.) All the "normal users" I know who've purchased computers lately bought laptops.

By alizard on Tuesday Aug 16

What a load of tosh

It never ceases to amaze me how these people get it so wrong. I couldn't run my business from a tablet or a laptop for that matter. I need a BIG screen (impossible on a tablet) a proper keyboard and mouse. Also without Outlook I would be lost. It'll be laptops that dissapear not tower/desktop PC's. I have a lot of small businesses that I deal with and I can't see them swapping their PC's for tablets. It just aint gonna happen.

By ahockings on Tuesday Aug 16

Thin client anyone?

What we need to separate out is the good old layers of IT architecture - persistence layer, applications layer and presentation layer.

What many business and even personal activities require in this day and age of the internet is a portable and usable presentation layer. What we now talk of as the 'cloud' is where the other layers can reside. Nothing new here (I was there when Larry Ellison was touting the thin-client 10-11 years ago).

However a lot of business and personal (gaming) activities require is local application and persistence layers - so some of us still need PCs/Laptops etc.

Some of us (admit it - you've got a smart phone with a thin email client) use a combination of the two for different purposes. What's always interesting to observe is the resistence sometimes to move to the most appropriate model for each situation.

By CoxJul on Tuesday Aug 23