According to reports from the Canalys Channel Forum, which is taking place about 8kms from where I am at the VMworld event, also in Barcelona, HP EMEA senior vice president of printing and personal systems, Eric Cador, believes a lack of innovation is to blame for the slowdown in the PC industry.
"There hasn’t been enough innovation and that is a reason why that industry has slowed down," he said. For too long, the PC industry has been fixated on improving speed and power instead of making desktops and laptops more user-friendly, he argued.
Obviously, this is true. PCs are, in many instances, ugly, unwieldy boxes with clunky keyboards and mice and, until quite recently, big blocky monitors. Part of the reason for this was that PCs were more often than not built to sit in offices rather than in someone’s living room. Needless to say, aesthetic standards and design quality did not feature highly.
To a large degree, they still don’t. HP’s latest all-in-ones might be promoted as stylish and sleek but they have also been accompanied with the inevitable accusations that they are nothing more than knock offs of Apple’s longstanding iMac design.
Innovation, such as it is in the PC industry, remains the almost exclusive province of two companies: Intel and Microsoft. With all the other names in the PC industry nothing more than glorified resellers of Wintel products, there has been little or no incentive to innovate among themselves. Most of the time, if they have done anything it has been merely tinkering at the edges.
Cador seems to think that Windows 8 may help PC manufacturers to produce better designed products, if only to take advantage of the operating system’s touch capabilities. But that only goes to show the deep level of dependence hardware vendors have on Microsoft to deliver innovation. This suggests there is a serious level of passivity in the PC industry where very few vendors take it upon themselves to create something different and fresh.
I’m not entirely convinced, however, that the PC industry has been severely affected by a lack of innovation. It was hardly a byword for innovation in the good old days but manufacturers still sold a ton of PCs and laptops. Rather, I think PCs and laptops are struggling because we’re in tough economic times and also because they are being superseded in quite a few areas by tablets.
Someone remarked to me today that VMworld was a bit like an advert for Apple because so many people at the event had iPads. I noticed the same phenomenon at last year’s conference and also at the Citrix Synergy event. It will probably be repeated when Citrix Synergy kicks off next week (in Barcelona again). And I’d wager that when Cador was making his comments at the Canalys forum, there were quite a few people in the audience with a tablet of some description as well. Many others would probably have a smart phone.
So it’s not quite about innovation but more about PCs and laptops not being able to metamorphose into a completely different form. You can’t do anything about that, says the man who has just written this column on an iPad.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers