Who’s killing the PC? Blame the cloud

By Jason Perlow,    zdnet.com

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’d think it was the beginning of the end for the Personal Computer industry.  According to a report recently released by Gartner, sales of PCs in the first quarter of 2013, regardless of manufacturer and operating system platform, are the worst since an all-time low in the second quarter of 2009.  IDC showed similar results in another study released during the same time period indicate that sales are down 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012.

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So the decline has been happening for at least two years, if not a bit more. We’ve seen the warning signs of a climate change, now we’re seeing clear signs of the beginning of an extinction event.

Therefore, we can’t blame this rightly or wrongly on the wholesale rejection of a single OS release by end users due to substantial UX changes as much as some people would like one to believe, because the downward trend has been with us for quite some time.

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Tablets and low-power convertibles and inexpensive ultrabooks provide an experience that yeilds sufficient functionality that is not as rich as the the traditional PC experience, whether is is overall processing power or app complexity, but they are less expensive, more battery efficient and much easier to lug around.

I learned this lesson for myself personally when I went to a trade conference this week in Las Vegas and only brought a Microsoft Surface RT and two of my smartphones with me, an iPhone 5 and a Nokia 920. I was away from my home office with my full-blown PC laptop running Windows 8, and yet I was still able to get all of my work done.

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But to make these Post-PC devices do their magic, and to make the transition without being disruptive to the traditional business workflows and workloads that we currently enjoy, you need something significant to offload the functionality of complex applications that run on PCs today.

That significant thing is the Cloud, and I think we can also say with a high degree of confidence that this is going to be the workhorse of the personal computing experience going forward. Today, the Cloud is highly misunderstood and it is also in many cases, vilified and feared.

But it is also what is going to facilitate a seamless transition to an industry dominated by Post-PC devices and allow our PC software ecosystem to evolve into a healthy end-state………..  Read this discussion

DCL: Windows 8? No wonder he’s having this experience.