The article is not questioning the dominance of the current desktop computing paradigm. It is to illuminate the speed at which computing platforms can be displaced.
The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers.
PC sales have not been contributing much to the bottom lines of HP, Dell etc for many years now.
In business, profit matters. Usage is indirectly useful if it leads to profits. This is the fundamental difference between the Apple and Google worldviews.
The tl;dr summary is that computer makers have to sell many more PCs to come close to what Apple is making from the sale of each iPhone or iPad.
First, the stacked data scaled to a constant upper line creates the false impression that PCs are going away, but actually the total market for computing is exploding.
Second, in the line charts, it's very difficult to discern which line is for which products.
I don't think it is appropriate to have the smartphones and tablets as a %market share competing against desktop platforms such as mac/pc. For one, while in general people either own a mac xor a pc, people in general don't own a smartphone xor a desktop (I assume).
The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop.
At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.
Interesting, though I wish he had cited sources for his data. Also be sure to note that the vertical axis is a log scale, and that a more complete version of the chart is at the very bottom of the post.
I'd be interested to see the historical sales figures on the server side as well, given the oft-cited dominance of Linux in server environments.
It would also be interesting to see figures for the number of machines in use by OS, instead of just sales by year. People replace their phones much more frequently than they do their PCs, but that doesn't mean they don't want their PCs or think that they can replace them with Android/iOS devices...
Uggh. All this is is another reminder about how close Commodore Business Machines was in the mid-late 80's at revolutionizing the PC industry and how they then dorked it up inexplicably.
Not seeing a whole lot of "falling" in the current PC industry, but then again a lot of companies in the early 80's were on top of the world.
Seems to me the upward trending platforms are all qualitatively different from the crashed ones in that they're not crystallized the way those earlier, more console-type ones were. So this visualization doesn't seem particularly illuminating to me.
Fall of PC platforms? I don't see any fall there, really, however much Horace wants it to be true.
The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers.
For example, take the mobile vs. desktop browsing metric from StatCounter.
The mobile share is barely inching up to 8% over the whole of 2011. That doesn't really show a fall of PC unless it's a headline from a site that has a reputation of twisting statistics to push its agenda.
Sure, it ignores actual gaming systems, a logrithmic scale, ignores the cost / unit, and glosses over flash games. It's still an interesting as a propaganda piece.
He also seems to be trying to compare against past platforms to show that PCs are peaking and will soon collapse.
Of course ignores what you point out - that the PC market is saturated (everyone has a computer), unlike in the 1980s where there was tons of room for growth from new adopters.
What else do you expect from Asymco and Horace? They predicted that Android would never take off like it did, The whole site seems to be predicated on telling Apple fans what they want to hear with a lot of twisted analysis.
They're basically the inventor of the "profit derived" metric (by which IIS is totally dominating Apache/nginx in web servers). Of course the PC is dying according to them.
I also don't understand how he has PC has as its own category of data, yet separates out PCs such as the TRS-80.
I can't look it up in Wikipedia, but I don't recall how the TRS-80 or other Tandy machines would not be categorized as PCs, even if they also carry the label of micro-computer.
This comes off as another tired attempt to write yet another "The Death of" article that are common to talking heads.
Except for older people who never had a chance to acquire the basic intuition to operate a PC, I'm not aware of anyone who does not own a PC and at least one or many other non-PC devices.
I think it is best said that the PC market has simply matured.
[+] [-] brisance|14 years ago|reply
The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers.
PC sales have not been contributing much to the bottom lines of HP, Dell etc for many years now.
In business, profit matters. Usage is indirectly useful if it leads to profits. This is the fundamental difference between the Apple and Google worldviews.
The tl;dr summary is that computer makers have to sell many more PCs to come close to what Apple is making from the sale of each iPhone or iPad.
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|14 years ago|reply
First, the stacked data scaled to a constant upper line creates the false impression that PCs are going away, but actually the total market for computing is exploding.
Second, in the line charts, it's very difficult to discern which line is for which products.
[+] [-] harshpotatoes|14 years ago|reply
The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop.
At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.
[+] [-] kibwen|14 years ago|reply
I'd be interested to see the historical sales figures on the server side as well, given the oft-cited dominance of Linux in server environments.
[+] [-] utexaspunk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drblast|14 years ago|reply
Not seeing a whole lot of "falling" in the current PC industry, but then again a lot of companies in the early 80's were on top of the world.
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] recoiledsnake|14 years ago|reply
The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers.
For example, take the mobile vs. desktop browsing metric from StatCounter.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2010...
The mobile share is barely inching up to 8% over the whole of 2011. That doesn't really show a fall of PC unless it's a headline from a site that has a reputation of twisting statistics to push its agenda.
[+] [-] cjensen|14 years ago|reply
So PC which have fallen include the TRS-80, Commodore, the Apple ][ and others.
[+] [-] onemoreact|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaar333|14 years ago|reply
Of course ignores what you point out - that the PC market is saturated (everyone has a computer), unlike in the 1980s where there was tons of room for growth from new adopters.
[+] [-] cooldeal|14 years ago|reply
They're basically the inventor of the "profit derived" metric (by which IIS is totally dominating Apache/nginx in web servers). Of course the PC is dying according to them.
[+] [-] TheCowboy|14 years ago|reply
I can't look it up in Wikipedia, but I don't recall how the TRS-80 or other Tandy machines would not be categorized as PCs, even if they also carry the label of micro-computer.
This comes off as another tired attempt to write yet another "The Death of" article that are common to talking heads.
Except for older people who never had a chance to acquire the basic intuition to operate a PC, I'm not aware of anyone who does not own a PC and at least one or many other non-PC devices.
I think it is best said that the PC market has simply matured.