| That is the relevant question. (What does Post-PC mean?) Looking back at the PC 'revolution' we see that initially computers were in the office and not so much at home. And if they were at home there was only 1 and generally shared. But what PC's did was create a place you could deliver an application (the PC provided input/output/storage) for the marginal cost of the software bits (which is quite small). So a tremendous number of companies sprang up to deliver those applications since the rate of return is quite high. As PC's migrated home, they did so primarily as an application vehicle and less so as a tool. This is markedly different than most of the readership of this site (which uses computers as tools) but it is far and away the largest use for computers in the home and individually owned computers. The programability came at a price however, it made compatibility challenging (bad mojo to have your app not work on your customers machine) and it enabled a threat to undesired programming (viruses, worms, etc) running on it. For the biggest chunk of the market, the customer's ideal device has no programmability capability outside an application's need for configuration, no way for any application to interfere with another application, and rock solid compatibility. Sort of the 'game console' equivalent of information appliance. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all gunning for that space (and apparently so is Valve :-). Apple's approach is an appliance OS (iOS) and a developer OS (MacOS), Google's approach is an appliance OS (ChromeOS) and developer tools (Chrome, AppEngine, Etc.), Microsoft has the developer OS (Windows) with what might be called the third attempt at an appliance version (Windows RT) (previously Windows CE and Windows Embedded). If these efforts mature the way their respective owners would like, the bulk of the "computers" out there will be information/data appliances running their appliance environment. Computers will go back to something nerds, scientists. and engineers use and "regular" people ignore. |