The PC Is Not Dead 451
Belle writes "Bill Gates has an op-ed in this morning's BW Online, in which he responds to the magazine's question Is the PC dead? with a resounding "No!" and argues that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come." From the article: "The result is that the personal computer has become far more than a cog in the machine of corporate computing -- it's an essential tool for every individual in the organization. Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt."
Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives. Those who appreciate technology will have little reason to follow this lead, and therefore will not.
On the other hand, those home users who do not enjoy technology, who simply wish to treat their computer as a dumb interface to DRMed MP3s and the web/email will probably be delighted with a 'thin client'. There will still continue to be money in the other market for a while, though. As for 'thin clients' in the office, then I say, sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing. They just won't kill the home PC. That's my take on this.
Last of all: Is it just me or does someone predict this every year? I first heard it in about 1996, and I'm still waiting! This claim wears even more thin with every passing year...
My head hurts from the market speak. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill may think web services are the next great thing for the PC "ecosystem" (WTF? when did my office become wild planet?), but quite frankly, he needs to worry about making the PC safe, secure, and usable first.
So...boring...losing...consciousness... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Long time ago dumb terminals look now richly appointed digital tapestry personal computing unleash potential provide collaborative strategic business enhancers future digito-infotainment convergence aggregation hub integrating synergies for advancement of opportunity. Buy more. Thanks. Oh, and thin clients suck, give people their own hard drive for all the above to happen. Thanks again."
Seriously, is there anything notable here? So very insight-free.
Dumb Terminals For Everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
And now with Flash memory sticks, you can run entire environments separate from the OS entirely!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
The PC Is Evolving, Not Dying (Score:5, Insightful)
What we're seeing is really the continuation of the gradual shift from "big iron" mainframes to "microcomputers" to PCs to PDAs to iPods. Technology is becoming cheaper, more flexible, and more diversified.
I think the traditional PC is close to saturation. Where the money is are in things like media center/home theater PCs, secondary computers, and specialized machines. Since most everyone has a PC, the real quest is to use PC technology to replace other existing gadgets.
That's why small cheap computers like the Mac mini and home theater systems like Microsoft's Media Center Edition systems are growing while the PC market itself is relatively stagnant in comparison to the boom years.
Of course, the massive success of the iPod also points to a totally new market for consumer electronics that interfaces with a traditional PC acting like a "digital hub" as Steve Jobs calls it. That's why media features like DVD burners, FireWire and memory card inputs and large displays are the big selling points in PCs these days. It's not about a monolithic device that makes you sit in front of it to do everything, it's about a whole slew of gadgets that work seamlessly together to perform different tasks.
The concept of the PC won't go away, but the way in which PCs are used is slowly changing. It's like evolution usually goes - the big creatures die out and those smaller more agile ones flourish in the aftermath.
Year after year (Score:2, Insightful)
The truth is that these are plain shots in the dark.
IMHO the PC is far from becoming dead, and I am happily watching as tech honchos tear their hairs off as most of the world population refuses to upgrade their equipment/software in 2 year-cycles, and realizes that 1ghz of ANYTHING plus 256MB of ANYTHING plus a 20GB drive is more than plenty for the average user's websurfing, mail-sending and pr0n viewing!
This is about mid-level, office computer usage (Score:5, Insightful)
As computers get more and more powerful, I think it's going to mostly affect the two groups of users at the opposite ends of the spectrum: super-users and home users. Super users are those who need all the power they can get, all the time. These are the people working in medicine, in modeling, 3D work, video, etc...
Then you have the home users. Why will this effect home users more than corporate users? Because home usersdo more things! They'll start experimenting with audio and video on the computer (many of them already do). They'll try to run the latest games.
Finally, you have the middle-of-the-road office computer users - probably the very ones that BusinessWeek was originally talking about. These are the people whose PCs are supposedly doomed. And they might be. But the PC as a whole (as the Slashdot title would have us believe?) Not a chance.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no. It's simply a realization that for some users within an organization, a full fledged workstation is not required. If someone is only using their computer for Office, web and email, it doesn't merit paying for a full workstation; a thin client will suit them just fine. Such a move does not imply a failure to appreciate technology.
Also, I wouldn't quickly right off thin-client server systems as being technologically backwards. It takes some amount of neat tech to make a thin client seem as, or near as, rich as a full workstation.
Isn't Bill always like this? (Score:4, Insightful)
And then shortly after such claims, he always follows them up by pointing out that Windows will, of course, be there, paving the way for the next wave of computing.
There's something about overly optimistic people that make me immediately doubt what they're claiming. Bill's no exception... By always ignoring the bad (Windows exploits, virii, etc), and gushing about the very operating system which is causing most of these problems, he really paints a picture of someone who's totally out of touch with the modern computing scene.
To me at least...
Yet, Windows isn't geared toward business (Score:5, Insightful)
He is correct (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what he misses the opportunity to talk about isn't if the PC is going away, but "does Windows matter"? The last company I was at switched 95% of the company to Open Office to save costs (a 400 person environment for huge saving for them). Many of the penetration testers and security analysts I work with now use Macs because they can get to all of the UNIX tools they need without having to reboot into Windows to work on Microsoft Office files. (I know, they could do that in Crossover, but the Macs are easier - and these are hard core OpenBSD/Linux guys).
So the question is, does Windows dead? No, not yet, and I think like IBM they will always be around. But others are nipping at the heals, between Firefox on one end, consoles (which is eating away a lot of the game market from the PC), Apple is rising again (back to 5% by the end of this year by some analysts) - so MS can't just use the monopoly as a battering ram to force Windows on everyone.
They kind of remind me of Napoleon's march in Russia. Lots of momentum, big army, took over everything - but over time, the things that Napoleon couldn't fight (the weather, like Free software compitition), or supply chains (consoles eating away at the game market), or just dumb luck (Apple's iPod success turning into a method to draw users to buy new Macs, especially at $600 a pop) brought him down. Maybe 10, 15 years from now we'll look back at a market 33% Windows, 33% Apple, and 33% Linux (on the desktop - the server I imagine will be 40% Windows, 40% Linux/Unix, 20% Apple) and wonder how it all happened.
Funny that one of Mr. Gate's big heroes is Napoleon. I hadn't remembered it until I was almost done writing this.
PC Economics according to Microsoft: (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes.
Cost of hardware: apparently $0
Re:That's funny. (Score:3, Insightful)
He amassed his weatlh in the PC business. One might say that's a measurement of success. One might also say that such a successful person is qualified to speak about it more so than a random journalist. If he says positive things about it, where's your pile of cash that qualifies you to argue about it?
Now granted, I'll immediately concede that most of Microsoft's success comes from less than ethical business practices and marketing, rather than technology innovation.
I'd also admit that I detect a bit of underhanded marketing any time Bill Gates says ANYTHING about the computer industry.
Having said that, I'd still take his opinion over some cynical slashdot poster or ill-informed journalist about the computer industry.
Questionable quality and poor business practices aside... they are managing to sell a lot of stuff to a lot of people without the use of gun point. Though, they do buy and stop the sale of a lot of things at legal gun point.
Oh, who am I kidding with this post. Sorry, I'll revert. MICROSOFT BAD! BILL GATES ARE EVIL! BRAINS!!!!
I'm confused (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's funny. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not just that, but most of Billy's wealth is still amassed as stock shares, which is potential wealth. Ie, that wealth isn't really his yet. So if he ever says anything disparaging against Microsoft he'll LOSE a truckload of money if the share price goes down.
That's why I really don't understand why investors take the word of company executives seriously, the executives are merely trying to keep their stock prices high.
It also seems somewhat wrong to let Gates write journalism columns anyway, because of the above conflict of interest. It's more-or-less giving Microsoft free advertising space (Or - can anyone point out any message where Gates actually said something worthwhile and also negative about Microsoft?). While I'm sure many journalists own certain stocks themselves, Billy is in a whole different class. He owns enough stock to buy several small nations, so giving him a platform in a supposedly neutral magazine to advertise just doesn't seem proper.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Grinding to a halt... (Score:2, Insightful)
Companies like, oh say... Microsoft.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. I decorate my room with computers, you insensitive clod. I have one atatched to the wall behind me. This is Slashdot after all.
Citrix sucks compared to X anyway, except on the ease-of-use factor for the majority of business desktop users (open browser, click link on homepage, enter password, application appears). Come to think of it, I've seen X running that way too.
X uses a lot less resources on the machine where the application is actually be executed. It's only a matter of time before people start running apps in Wine on Windows, just so that the output can be displayed in a browser via X11. That'll be the best thing since sliced bread.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not the only one. Bill's article distinctly lacked reasoning, at least as would apply to rebutting what Nicholas Carr said. Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No. That's all Carr was really saying.
Mr. Gates has selective memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when IBM (IBM ) launched its first personal computer in 1981, business computing was a scarce resource. If a company was large enough even to afford computers, they were mostly so-called dumb terminals hooked up to large mainframe computers.
Mr. Gates seems to forget the Apple II, which a lot of businesses owned before 1981. IBM did not create the idea of personal computers for business, they merely responded (grudgingly) to their customers.
Bill should know this - unless he's forgotten that his company existed before 1981 - he's no doubt just trying to spin it his way. In any case he doesn't actually address the issues in the original article which argues that intranet/internet based applications will make life easier for corporate computing.
People who can only spin the past are likely to be spun by the future.
PC inefficiency (Score:2, Insightful)
Other things that are not dead! (Score:5, Insightful)
Film is not dead! I can buy those familiar yellow boxes of it right in my supermarket checkout line!
Vinyl LPs are not dead! DJ's still use them and you can buy new turntables in Best Buy!
The vacuum tube is not dead! Audio hobbyists still insist on them!
CP/M is not dead! It survives on in Novell Netware servers! Which are not dead, either!
The Oldsmobile is not dead! I still see them on the road!
VHF analog broadcasts are not dead!
Typewriters are not dead! Carbon paper is not dead! Slide rules are not dead! Rotary calculators are not dead! The Bodoni typeface is not dead! The Cinerama wide-screen process is not dead! Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines are not dead!
Bill Gates is not dead! And neither am I!
But Bill Gates and I are both older than we used to be.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
I would have to agree. I would love to create a thin client setup at home. I'd love a dump (cheap) terminal in most every room that is small enough to not require a lot of space, but large enough for a reasonable sized keyboard (email,ssh,etc) but is mostly just screen for websurfing, getting weather/news updates, etc. Add one in the kitchen tied into a recipe database. A webcam and mike in the babies room and a portable screen with speakers and presto, instant baby monitor, with color screen. With the click of a button start playing soft music when the baby won't go back to sleep.
There's no end to the possibilities of low power dump terminals that can do high bandwidth low CPU tasks like streaming video/audio (VoIP, PVR, Video on Demand, etc) and the simple things like check email and the web.
Now, if only I had the time and money to set this all up
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything that relies upon the end-user for security is a potential threat to the network. But by giving them thin clients with limited apps that they can access from a server (or cluster), you are giving them the same functionallity that they need to do their jobs with none of the added risk.
At Amazon from 95-97, we all ran thin clients with web apps and we never had a problem
It's only a step back for the end-user; it's a step forward for the IT dept that has to support the PC of the end-user.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vorbis is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Without support from the leading music player software
WinAmp plays Vorbis files just fine, thankyouverymuch. Oh, you meant that proprietary DRM-crippled bag of bits needed to redeem my winning Pepsi caps? Feh.
Actually, for accuracy, I would have to say "Windows Media Player plays Vorbis files just fine". But as you can well imagine, I find that even more intolerable than iTunes. And, since WinAmp comes in as #2 (with iTunes somewhere around #6, I believe), it will suffice to make my point - Namely, even something totally ubiquitous in the Mac doesn't even rank in the bigger picture. Biggest fish in the koi pond, meet a small shark.
and portable device
You mean the "Car CD player", most of which still don't even do MP3s? Or for more personally portable, the "CD Walkman", still about 10M units ahead of the iPod? Nope, no Ogg. No AAC, either.
Hey, I like the iPod. I consider it a cute little gadget. If Apple decided to play well with others, not charge more than everyone else for a given level of hardware, and lose the sneer, I'd probably buy one. But half a dozen comparable, cheaper, and most importantly, DRM-free devices exist from manufacturers that don't want to lock me in with their own proprietary format (well, you could point to ATRAC, but I don't even think Sony itself takes that seriously outside their MiniDisc recorders).
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You will need all that extra processing power and hard drive to drive all the spyware, adware and viruses that will be comming out.
Now I am still trying to understand why the cashier at walmart needs a full fledged PC, just to sell me my stuff.
Or any call center agent....
Don't know whether to laugh or cry (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean Microsoft would grind to a halt.
Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would slingshot themselves to mach speed in terms of productivity.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Go back and re-read your post... That seems to be some big geek mojo to me.
-N
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is usually false, both in terms of hardware cost, lifetime expectancy, power consumption, and deployment cost, yadda yadda. Any way you slice it, a workstation is not cheaper than any but the most unfairly-priced and poorly-designed thin client.
> It's stupid to waste all this computing power, only to channel more and more
> money into more and more powerfull app servers.
A bunch of single processer machines, each with its own board, memory, IO, fans, footprint and power supply (w/ AC-DC transformer) is neccessarily more "wasteful" in terms of resources than a WTS running on an SMP machine. That's basic physics. When the cost between one and the other becomes insignificant, then you start to have a point; or if you're rich enough, maybe it doesn't matter. Nowadays, though, it usually does.
> We've got incredibly cheap computing power that would have been unimaginable
> even 20 years ago, lets not waste it all - design ways to leverage to power of
> workstations while alleviating the administrative overhead.
That's exactly what VM clusters and terminal servers do. For workstations, the best you can do is: imaging, or scripted installs with SMS/Netinstall; either case requires a server infrastructure anyway. So you're back to having thick clients AND extra machines in the back room (which are idle most of the time, like fat clients).
This is an age-old argument, and there are sometimes cases where thick clients are a must-have (3D or even 2D graphics, or non multi-user aware apps, for example). But most users can go without and suffer no loss in productivity; hell, they can even benefit, because it's easier and cheaper to engineer reliability into the system.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem, basically, is that IT administrators suck. Address that issue (with better tools, more admins, better training, whatever) and that will address the problems with PCs in the office. All the problems that thin-client environments claim to address are administrative, rather than technical.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
You must lock down windows to keep all of the trojans, trashy games, etc. that will destroy your stable environmment otherwise.
Need I point out that I've seen thin client apps having problems on certain machines? The browser itself is very fat and full of inconsistencies.
Lots of app can be engineered either way without particular consequence, however the PC can run thin-client apps just fine, where a think client can not run a fat app where it makes sense.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're from the Windows world, right? Getting a few Unix servers to advertise themselves to a network of X terminals is trivial, and has been so for at least fifteen years. I've worked at a company with such a setup, and I failed to see the disadvantages compared to having my own CPU and disk. And in that particular case, we usually had a dozen heavy simulations running on each server ...
Re:Dumb Terminals For Everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
For awhile, the other members of my IT group and I fought bringing the PC's into the corporation, citing licensing/maintenance fees, abuse potential, support costs. Of course we were looked upon as simply trying to save our jobs.
It's amusing to me now, no longer in the IT field, to see such an emphasis on thin clients and a resurgence of interest in dumb terminals connected to central "servers." Places where I work now use PC's mostly to run terminal emulation programs connecting them to central servers/mainframes (for electronic medical record software, Outlook on-line, internet access to medical reference websites, etc)--they might as well be VT100's.
They say the poularity of yo-yos is an 8 year cycle, I suspect the popularity of dumb terminals is about 15. I predict the next big wave of PC popularity around 2020. j/k
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, the mainframe word processor kinda sucked.
Re:Maybe next year, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
When a 10 user department is completely unable to do their work it's considered far more serious than one or two machines in the workgroup being down.