Wednesday 24 August 2011

The post-PC world! or the everyone still uses a PC but also has a convergence device world.

 

So It's official, the PC is dead. Everyone that matters thinks so, or at least many Apple fanboys tech bloggers seem to think so. In 5 years time most people will have a smartphone and a tablet and therefore not need a desktop PC and by extension Windows.

I have to say that I think this is a very narrow minded view, possibly brought about because tech bloggers tend to only need a web browser and a lightweight blogging tool. I'm going to look at it like this, are we going to need a stationary device that has high performance and a full keyboard and mouse in the next five years. I have to say that we are, I see no reason to suggest the contrary. The main reason against losing the PC is that tablets and smartphones are awful at content creation. Touch is really cool and intuitive but it is also inefficient, error prone and inaccurate. Tablets and smartphones can only really use touch, in order to maintain the form factor. Their are a couple of Asus tablets that have keyboards but the another medium term reason against this change is software legacy, they run android which is a great OS but at the moment doesn't have any productivity suites, nor I think will it( at least for a few years). I envision that soon if you need to edit office files on the go you will use a cloud based solution and hope your tablet has a keyboard.

In fact if I ever meet someone that makes the argument that we will no longer need a PC I will say what your really saying is that you no longer need a keyboard and mouse and that is clearly foolish. The keyboard/mouse combo is and shall be for the foreseeable future the cheapest, simplest, most tactile, most customisable, most efficient and most supported input device. Nothing comes close. Not even an Apple track pad( a wonder of advertising, buy something for more money that was originally designed to be a worse version of a mouse because it has shortcuts!!!)

Man I rant a lot.

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