Every time here and then, someone prophetically pronounces that PC era is truly over. Things seem to be especially real this time as so many tablets flood the market, looking to destroy the PC market at once. On the same page with Steve Jobs, IBM’s CEO Mark Dean believed that PC era’s days have been numbered. Microsoft’s CEO Frank Shaw thinks that PC era still has some juice left, and so he coins it as PC era plus.
Sure, the cloud has everyone wants to jump on board and think that PC era is over. They all like to think that powerful PCs are unnecessary, because preferable way of going about computing is to marry to smaller devices that utilize the cloud for storages and processing powers. It sounds a lot like PC is an ex girlfriend and mainframe is an ex girlfriend that has now become the girlfriend again. Great, so we don’t care how much more powerful PCs can get, but what if ISPs are going to charge its customers with higher mobile/data service charges? After all, data float from the customers to the cloud and back must be in hefty volume of bandwidth, right?
Talking about getting everything in the cloud isn’t an answer. Instead, I feel getting PCs to be evermore powerful will improve the architecture of mobile devices. Why? There will be an incentive to make mobile devices to catch up to PCs’ capabilities, because shrinking hardware to ever smaller devices with as many horsepowers as regular PCs or even mainframes is quite a noble goal to strive for. Powerful PCs won’t have to rely on the cloud 100% of the time, and yet PCs can still use the cloud — having the best parts of both world (i.e., cloud or not). When customers use powerful PCs, they know they have a choice of not worrying that they have to pay more to get things done in term of bandwidth, because they can just rely on the PCs alone. No big ISPs can dictate that they have to be on the cloud with crazy data charges for them to process intensive applications. Keeping data roam at home!
Powerful PCs can improve the Internet, because the Internet needs powerful PCs. With more powerful PCs around, home users and businesses alike may get creative in making their PCs resourceful for the Internet in ways they think they know best. Sure, mobile devices are great for the Internet too, but if mobile devices such as tablets are the only way to go, I fear data charges are going to go through the roof if such devices connect to the Internet at all times, unless ISPs are going to be generous which I fail to see such an opportuneness anytime soon. Please prove me wrong!
In summary, I’m not comfortable with the idea that PC era is over unless ISPs merge mobile data service and home broadband into the same plan! I don’t feel right to know that the most powerful device in my arsenal is the iPad 2, because I can’t really turn it into a private media server, unless I don’t care about data charges. Users are just going to be more geeky everyday in term of computing, and so don’t expect users to go cavemen for they have found new love with the tablets. in computing, the idea of polygamy will be more proper than one’s real relationship. So, we can’t really expect geeks or everyday computer users to go monogamy with tablets. To prove this point, many users are still going to buy tablets even though they have smart phones that behave similarly to tablets.
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/237916/ibm_declares_
the_end_of_the_pc_era.html#tk.rss_news
