Posted on 09/20/2013 11:02:42 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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I went to IDF this year hoping to find a reason that PCs weren’t doomed and came away knowing all key players are actively making things worse. The PC isn’t just in trouble, it is actively being destroyed because no one involved is interested in changing.
Lets face it, the modern Windows 8 PC is a miserable experience, it is not a step forward from its predecessors in any measurable way but the steps backward are as numerous as they are obvious. The forthcoming Windows 8.1 is at best window dressing attempting to placate the critics without actually fixing any of their complaints.
(Excerpt) Read more at semiaccurate.com ...
They’ll do until something else better comes along. What about an ANDROID based PC?................
Right. No way businesses are going to give up their PCs. What would they use instead? Tablets? There would be too many security risks. (well more than the NSA is creating now)
and hopefully some major Linux advances will happen soon
iPads and Mobile are great for reading information, but if you ever want to create a document, presentation, or spreadsheet, you’ll always need a keyboard and mouse.
the industry is falling on its own petard
the race to the bottom on price
turned first the components and then the units
into commodities
while the mobile business leaders focused on profit-margins
NOT low price, and with those margins kept investing
ahead of the “PC” business
there is one aspect of it all that does not make me jump for joy
all data couid be going to “the cloud” in time
making big brother (the government/NSA/tech industry partnerships) even bigger and more threatening to real Liberty
You could run a stripped-down Linux distro on a Raspberry Pi without issue. Office automation apps might not work exceptionally well, but it’s something.
I don’t believe this hype, really. The Linux community is growing every day. This author seems to be focused solely on the user experience on Windows 8, which I agree is horrible, but he offers little in the way of legitimate market realizations for PCs to go the way of the dodo.
The BIGGEST reason we might see PCs start to dwindle is the idea of cloud-based thin clients or virtual desktop infrastructure (i.e. VMware VDI) where we all have stripped-down desktop PCs running on remote kernels. We already use them in the business world. I don’t see it being a big seller in the consumer retail market though.
The avg college kid does not have a PC. Most are tablets. In the next 5 years I believe phones/mini tablets will be the norm. Everything will be touch screen. You dont go to the office but work from home.
Hope you trust your employees.
Charlie the Tuna has hated Intel for 15 years.
I don’t know why, he just does.
If anything, lately, I would not call what is happening with Linux “advances”.
lol.
Probably not but at least we have some very very stable ones like Ubuntu 12.04
Maybe it’s because he’s “not the one.”
Not to mention watching streaming movies, tv shows or other unmentionables.
Amen to that....also, I find it near impossible to type on a tablet, laptop, or phone..
bump
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!"
What is this? The 20th such report in the last 20 years?
The Cloud?
That same concept did not catch on in 1960, and it sure won't this time. People and businesses rationally want control of their own data, without the easy access by hackers, inside criminals and the GUMMINT!
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Xbitlabs has :
Pricing and Packaging of Windows 8.1, Windows 8.1 Pro Unveiled.
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Microsoft Will Not Launch Discount Campaigns with Windows 8.1
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I find myself making the same point over and over again. When people say “The PC is dead (or dying)” it’s well to stop and think about what is said by the people who say this and what is thought by people who read it.
I think the statement really means “The days of explosive growth for PC’s are over”. When people read this they think “The PC is going the way of the dodo bird”.
No the PC is not going to go away. But I do tend to agree that the days of year over year growth are over.
Think about mainframes as one example. The “death of the mainframe” was widely proclaimed a long time ago. But guess what - they still exist and are used by all sorts of businesses.
10 years from now I feel will still be using PC’s. But they’re not going to be under everyone’s Christmas tree the way they were in the past.
I still don’t find Windows 8 “miserable”. Anyone who continues that line has an agenda.
If you can use windows 7, you can use windows 8. Period. It’s about 4 clicks different. And some of the context menus make managing your machine easier, not harder.
Yes, I run windows 8 on ALL of my machines. Is there room for improvement in the interface? always. What version of Windows since 3.1 has that NOT been true?
But the HATE. The outright HATE every single solitary time MS releases a new OS... MS isn’t killing the PC, the users are doing it themselves by being unsatisfiable no matter what MS does.
The PC is STILL the bastion of freedom and open development. When you need to create some software that does something new or specific, or you want to sell a pice of specialty hardware to the public and have them use it easily what do you use? A PC. Why? It’s the only platform that is both OPEN enough and EASY enough for end users to use.
On that front the PC is never going to die completely. It will continue to be the development platform for everything else... because it’s the only one you can successfully develop on.
There may be a rush to “appliance” devices today, but general purpose computing will never die. And someday the curve will go back the other way as people demand more flexibility.
A remote kernel, with local storage, would be interesting. No need to worry about viruses, since there is no local OS to infect, but your data could still be fairly secure residing physically on your own computer
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