The recent reports about declining PC sales have focused much on Microsoft and the fact that its Windows OS has been at the heart of the PC experience for decades.
With much speculation around the fact that Windows 8 has caused something of a debacle, Windows XP going out of support and Windows 7 still gaining ground in the enterprise market, some have pointed to the company’s poor handling of recent technology trends, suggesting that it has lost the plot, as it were.
But here’s a bit of wild speculation for you: what if Windows 8 was carefully calculated to hasten the demise of the traditional PC?
Nothing lasts forever, and in the manner of coal mining, whaling and putting children up chimneys, some old businesses simply come to an end as tastes, social mores, business or technology simply moves on. Well, it seems that the old PC, a box with a monitor, keyboard and mouse attached, is going the way of the adding machine, the typewriter and the rolodex.
The phenomenal success of the iPad and later, the tablet form factor in general, has not passed Microsoft by, nor indeed its watchers and shareholders. Redmond’s lack of offerings in the area had been a matter of concern for some time and now that tablets seem to be displacing PC altogether, many have been worried that Microsoft’s greatest product line, the Windows operating system, might be going the way of the Dodo. But what if the heavily touch-centric interface of Windows 8, which seems to make little sense in the old fashioned pointing device paradigm, was actually carefully calculated to hasten the demise of the PC?
Look at it this way: Microsoft sees that the iPad is more or less unassailable in its market segment. It also sees that Android tablets are not making a dent either, but are dominating the low cost segment where people seem to like the form factor but can’t be bothered paying a premium. So, Redmond says that the segment to go for is the tablet that can do it all, but for people who care not for the "experience" of owning an iPad. With the work already done educating the market as to the versatility of the platform, Microsoft begins a campaign to focus on touch interfaces to the willing detriment of traditional PCs.
This unspoken consequence of focusing on touch is in response to the fact that hardware manufacturers have been pretty stagnant of late in offering exciting hardware to customers. A competitive Windows Vista machine will easily run Windows 7 or 8 in terms of pure processing power, so what’s the difference?
Focusing on touch is in response to the fact that hardware manufacturers have been pretty stagnant of late in offering exciting hardware to customers"
It is really only in terms of graphics power and displays that any real advances have been made the form factor, in terms of customer perception. Sure, there have been speed increases in the likes of solid states drives, faster RAM and processors etc, but do end users really care? These slow, incremental changes having little effect bar the PC being capable of more things, so it can be a utility (a games, media and general entertainment centre) has meant that there is little actual reason to upgrade. It is not as if these things have only come about recently either.
Windows Media Centre has been available since later versions of XP. So it is not like the jump from literally dumb PCs to multi-media (with CD players and sound cards!) or the addition of USB that actually made connecting things easy, or even the move to flat panel displays. These things made major differences to users. The incremental changes in the last few years, particularly in the mobile world, have failed to set the world on fire. When these are taken in the context of the developing capabilities of phones and tablets, the humble PC has been truly eclipsed.
So, did the boffins in Redmond acknowledge the inexorable decline and decide a final nail was required in making Windows 8 a less than desirable experience on such devices? It may not be as clear cut as all that, but it may also have been a recognised consequence that was willingly accepted.
But why might the hastening of the demise of the traditional PC be necessary? Well, one analyst suggests that it might be to usher in the post-PC era and to spur on the OEMs to innovate and make people want to buy computers again.
John Rizzuto, a research vice president with Gartner, argues in a blog that Windows 8 is necessary to usher in the next age of the personal computer, and it doesn’t really matter what form factor it is in, phablet, tablet, PC or laptop. Rizzuto’s point is that Windows 8 is exactly what Microsoft has decades of experience doing-changing the game with a leap forward. He argues that every time there has been a new version of Office or Windows, Microsoft has faced a struggle to convince users to switch over and enjoy the benefits. Sometimes that struggle has been easier (Windows 7) than others (Windows Vista) but that Redmond has doggedly done it, time and again.
Rizzuto does not sugar coat it when he says that the company has not always been successful in such endeavours, but he argues, it’s still around and still successful.
While no one would argue the fact that Microsoft has not been at the forefront of certain trends of late, this hack can remember when the iPod came out and thinking ‘this is not very good compared to my iRiver’. "Who?" says a chorus-quite. So, responding to a situation is not necessarily a sign of impending doom, just as the initial sales of Windows 8 are not the death knell for Windows as an OS.
What does seem to be doomed is the humble PC, unless, as many have argued, we stop differentiating between tablets and PCs, especially if they run the same OS. Indeed, we could say that in its death throes, the beige box was given a humane coup de grace from Redmond.
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