[leoc]

Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so. It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.

[nknighthb]

> But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so.

As far as I can tell, he was right, and still is. I see no evidence that more than a few percent of such people do so to this day.

> it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.

I don't see how that "disconfirms" anything at all. Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche? Because I don't believe that at all.

[leoc]

You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices? In fact the author was even more specific than that, and suggested that the kind of people who read the business section of the newspaper on the train, or the kind of people who used to fly to Comdex, would have no serious interest in using the time to get some work done on a computer instead. If we need evidence on this, here's a 2013 USA Today story http://www.usatoday.com/story/hotelcheckin/2013/04/30/more-t... reporting on a small decline in the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop.

> Is it your claim that the mere existence of the modern laptop proves regular work outside the home or office is not niche?

I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work, still less by people who were only going to use it at home. The Macintosh Portable was excoriated for its poor battery life, heavy weight and lack of a backlight because so many of the potential users wanted something to use on the road.

[nknighthb]

> You wouldn't agree that more than a few percent of the kind of people who were already heavy office PC users back in 1985 now use laptops on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms or at conferences or other people's offices?

No, I wouldn't. Hotel room is more likely, but is just substituting for home/office.

Huge numbers of heavy office PC users exist. Only a tiny fraction use a laptop anywhere but home or the office, and a tinier fraction of those do so routinely. It is a niche market.

> the "vast majority" of US business travellers who travel with a laptop

There aren't that many business travelers in the first place. You're already looking at a niche market.

> I promise you that the market for laptops back around 1989-90, when they started to be a real commercial hit, was not dominated by people who only wanted to shuttle theirs back and forth between home and work

My argument: On-the-go laptop use is niche.

Your apparent reply: Early laptop users used them on-the-go.

It's a non sequitur. That the ideal market for a product adopts the product does not mean that the market is not niche. The two have no relationship.