[mikeash]

The thing is, the "PC market" is rather artificially defined to be that market in which Microsoft dominates.

If you take the generic concept of "personal computer", what people were using those for five or ten years ago, people are now often using smartphones and tablets. Due to how the market is segmented for analysis, this isn't counted against Microsoft, but the money doesn't care how we segment it. The PC, in the long term, is going to be a niche market. Not today, not tomorrow, but in 5, 10, 20 years, a Microsoft that owns the entire PC market and little else will be a tiny, broken Microsoft.

If we count tablets in with PCs, then MS's "PC" monopoly is already gone. Tablets are selling around 1/3rd of what PCs are selling, so that gives MS a 75% share.

If we count smartphones in with PCs, then PCs almost disappear. Smartphones make up about 60% of the combined smartphone+tablet+PC market, with tablets making up another 10%, giving PCs 30%.

I'm sure you'd point out how PCs are still very popular, how MS still makes tons of money off them, how they're not going anywhere soon, etc. And I completely agree. But in the long term, it's not going to last, not in the form it exists now. I'm sure MS could do decently well for a very long time as they are, but they will stagnate and they will eventually shrink if they do so. They might remain powerful, but not to anywhere near the same degree.

For your Wal-Mart analogy, imagine if Wal-Mart totally owned retail sales, but "retail" was defined to exclude all online sales, and Amazon was selling 3x as much stuff as Wal-Mart once you counted online. Even as Wal-Mart owned the "retail" market and remained profitable, it would be completely reasonable to think that they might need to change.

[pnathan]

Yes and no.

There is a rather large market for the machines people do business with.

[mikeash]

Those won't remain PCs forever. "Post-PC" devices are already making substantial inroads, just to a much smaller degree so far. How many business laptops meant for field use have been replaced with smartphones and tablets because all they're used for is reading e-mails and viewing maps and such?

There's no doubt that MS can coast for a long time on PCs, but if they do, they're never going to dominate they way they did in the 90s, and they will eventually go away.

[pnathan]

You are absolutely right. But I'm pretty sure (crystal ball time) the post-PC device looks a good deal closer to a Surface Pro than an iPad.

That concept of keyboard + mouse + touch screen is really good; you need a way to have custom line of business apps developed for it. Apps need to be easily installable on it. It needs to have integration capabilities with oddish hardware. App state needs to be 'sane' and persist extant data without wrecking it due to swapping out of memory.

IOW, the capability lineup looks a lot like a PC on someone's desk, even though the form factor might reflow to be a tablet placed in a dock with attached bluetooth keyboard/mouse.

[mikeash]

You could be totally right about that. It's a bit of a tough sell to me to say that Surface will keep them relevant, but it's definitely far more possible and reasonable than them staying relevant sticking to the PC.

[angersock]

I suppose people all over the world need these?

Pffft. These so-called international business machines have no future.