RIP PC?

Dick Pountain - Idealog 222: Jan 11th 2013

I'm currently conducting an experiment whose outcome will profoundly affect the way I work in future: I'm writing this column for the very first time on my Nexus 7  tablet rather than on my laptop, and I've actually typed these first few sentences on its tiny on-screen keyboard using Jelly Bean 4.2's 'gesture typing' feature, with which I've become rather proficient over the last few weeks. (I'll tell you further down whether I stuck with this resolution or chickened-out and fetched my Bluetooth keyboard). The location of my experiment is our beloved chairman's glorious house on Mustique: sure it's a tough assignment but someone has to do it, and I'm here toiling away in the Caribbean sun so that you don't have to. I deliberately left London without my laptop to see whether I could cope, and so far haven't missed it at all. The Nexus has provided all my Spotify tunes, my YouTube movies, email correspondence, and now text creation (in Word format) in faultless fashion.

Prophesying 'The Death of the PC' is liable to embroil me in a raging troll-fest nowadays, but I can't help it if the phrase just won't leave my head. Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading several insightful analyses of the future prospects for both Intel and Microsoft that leave me in no doubt that both firms are going to have to get used to reduced rations rather soon.

Intel has unquestionably missed the boat in the low-power processor sector: its strategic error in believing the x86 architecture to be invulnerable looks increasingly like a catastrophe that has granted ARM the same sort of six-year lead in the mobile arena that Intel itself enjoyed all those years ago when IBM adopted the 8086 for its first PC. Intel is finally taking low-power seriously with new Atom chipsets, but the sheer volume of Google's ARM-based Android may have shut that door. Ironically enough, Intel actually owned a viable ARM-architecture range in the shape of the xScale devices it inherited by the purchase of DEC, but it never took them seriously - thanks to big-corporation inertia and hubris - and its recently-departed CEO Paul Otellini sold them off to Marvell back in 2005 as one of his first acts.

Microsoft too has floundered in trying to come to terms with mobileworld. It's not that it hasn't tried hard enough: on top of various versions of Windows Mobile/Phone over the years it's tried Ultra-Mobile PCs and even half-decent touch-screen Windows 'slates' like those by Samsung, but none of them ever really took off (and the omens are not good for the Surface to do any better). The reason is fundamentally the same as for Intel: massive success imposes an absolute demand for compatibility which stifles certain vital synergies.

Apple on the other hand has always been ruthlessly pragmatic about  changing CPU vendors, first deserting Motorola for PowerPC, then moving on to Intel and lately ARM whenever the time was right. And it had the courage to innovate boldly in its user-interface design with iOS. Google meanwhile has combined an open-source software model with agnosticism about hardware, and none of the whingeing about Android fragmentation can diminish its big numbers.

The mobile market has become a dinosaur trap financially too because profit margins on both hardware and software sales are far, far shorter than the Wintel twins are used to, and need. The cost of building fabs for ever smaller feature sizes becomes prohibitive just as margins are shrinking, and Moore's Law is being revealed as an increasingly tired marketing strategy rather than a science, now most users demand more battery life rather than speed.

The ultimate demise of the PC won't be in favour of Apple or any other hardware standard but rather in favour of cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, eBay and the like, whose products and services can be reached from *anyone's* mobile device. It would be wise for me to cover my arse by pointing out there will always be a few PC niches left, but I'm not sure I actually believe it. The vast grazing herds will be of thin mobile clients, and generations will arise that never knew a mouse or keyboard - even for business, even for accounts receivable.

And no, in the end I didn't need to deploy my Bluetooth keyboard at all for this column. As any writer will tell you, thinking up the next word takes far longer than to type it, so absolute typing speed is not the critical step. (I'll confess that decades of scribbling Graffiti have honed my sliding skills way beyond the average though).