The PC’s Death Might Also Mean the Web’s Demise

http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/death-pc-also-mean-end-web/

by grannyg00se • 13 years ago

69 95 13 years ago

Keith Rabois certainly seems to think so.

The mainstream, browser-based web has been around for some 20 years now. I like the web, I use it everyday so I want to think it will last forever. But I wonder, were people saying the same things about BBS'es and AOL-like portals, or whatever came before them? I don't really know, as I was so young when these things were happening. All things must pass, right?

ctrl• 13 years ago

The one thing the web has going for it is anyone can really make a webpage and essentially do whatever they like within the parameters of html, css, jscript etc. That's a pretty wide open nert (pun intended).

I can definitely see semi walled gardens going up as communities and user services. The benefits can be a greater more controlled user experience.

But even that said, web technologies are evolving and the web as a mobile option is still a bit in its infancy (aka you can still get a lot of web pages that look terrible)

__pThrow2• 13 years ago

http://catb.org/jargon/html/I/Imminent-Death-Of-The-Net-Pred...

Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: prov.

[Usenet] Since Usenet first got off the ground in 1980--81, it has grown exponentially, approximately doubling in size every year. On the other hand, most people feel the signal-to-noise ratio of Usenet has dropped steadily. These trends led, as far back as mid-1983, to predictions of the imminent collapse (or death) of the net. Ten years and numerous doublings later, enough of these gloomy prognostications have been confounded that the phrase “Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!” has become a running joke, hauled out any time someone grumbles about the S/N ratio or the huge and steadily increasing volume, or the possible loss of a key node or link, or the potential for lawsuits when ignoramuses post copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.

adventured2• 13 years ago

This will end up not being even remotely accurate. In fact, the web will continue to expand, but at a slower rate. Homes and offices will continue to have the big screen web experience, and this will actually become cheaper and more awesome (simultaneously the traditional PC will decline in sales volume while not decimating the home web browsing experience; the author doesn't grasp the obvious).

Why? Simple: there's no way to properly distribute the truly vast array of unrelated information the web contains, via mobile apps. Nobody is going to want to download the thousands of mobile apps it would require to get comprehensive access to all that information at their finger tips. I'm not a huge fan of the mobile browsing experience, but I use Chrome constantly for stray information tasks on my S4.

How? Smart phones will be powerful enough to begin treating them like true home computers in the next five years. Some would argue they're already there. We're obviously going to replace the home PC + big screen with a smart phone + big screen, or equivalent. Android sticks and or a future more powerful Chromecast equivalent, five years from now, will be like plugging a desktop into your big screen. The same will be true for work monitors, eg. in a personal office. A $50 stick for your big TV in the living room, and maybe one for your work monitor, and optionally just use your smart phone. In this formulation, nothing changes in the home with regards to the web except the death of the PC as we know it today (powered by Windows), replaced by a better solution.

nly3• 13 years ago

Hmm, I'm not sure about the "but we'd need thousands of apps!" argument. I agree that a versatile set of markup, scripting and styling languages is always going to be a valuable free-form, but that doesn't mean 95% of what people use the Web for right now can't be rapidly reimplemented.

As an example: there are 100s of millions of blogs out there right now... but most are just Wordpress with a theme. Develop a generic skin-able blog viewing app, win people over, and you've suddenly knocked hundreds of millions of blogs off the web and in to mobile sphere.

And what about shopping? One credit card handling interface would be a lot more consistent and trustworthy than putting everything in to 100 different sites that could be prone to phishing and all kinds of nasty CSRF and XSS bugs.

I think moving a lot of things to mobile could really improve the user experience, which is frankly awful in a lot of areas on the web.

adventured2• 13 years ago

I'm not downloading an app for all the following (off the top of my head):

game hints, movie times, stock quotes, business news, sports scores, sport highlights, sports stats, weather information, famous quotes, game reviews, gaming faqs, movie & actor information, tech news, hacker news, gadget reviews, programming Q&A, movie reviews, concert info, concert reviews, music, movies, books, book reviews, music reviews, music news, web hosting discussion, home fix-it crap, countless shopping circumstances, diet & health & exercise sites & discussion, drug information / supplement information & research, cooking recipes, cooking videos, photos, political news, political discussion, stray funny shit, local news, random blog posts on random blogs with random engines behind them (I'm not downloading six or eight apps to cover the blogosphere), and on and on and on and on and on

I'm not downloading apps for even the, let's say, 50 sites I visit each week covering a couple dozen topics. With almost every one of those items, a different site does it best (eg rotten tomatoes on reviews and imdb on raw info).

Now that's just a tiny list, and just from my personal list, and it's not comprehensive. There are hundreds of sites that contribute to that tiny list. A few of those items are covered comprehensively (eg Pandora in streaming music let's say or instagram), the rest aren't. And even in the case of instagram, there are dozens of sites that deal in images or photos that I want access to.

Today I wanted to know who makes rail tanker cars, and who might benefit from their updating due to safety concerns, there's no app for that, the information was on the web among a dozen very different sites, and that's exactly where it'll remain. There are a thousand subjects I could spend the next few hours rattling off as examples, from auto repair to home repair to cooking to porn, that will not be even remotely covered by a single king app.

The web will live long and prosper, and a very select few categories will get smashed by killer apps.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

The problem is that nobody wants to be syndicated by one blogging app. They will want people to download their own app so everyone can see how creative they are and they can maximize their ad revenue.

quaunaut2• 13 years ago

I couldn't possibly disagree more. I don't think apps are going anywhere either, but I'd limit their days before I limit the web's.

* As the web gets faster and gains more capabilities, it will encompass everything apps currently consider their domain.

* By default it contains no gatekeepers, whereas apps on mobile devices primarily go through one central source. This carries with it safety, but also a higher barrier to entry: And generally, higher barrier to entry is something people are only willing to endure if given good reason to. Having the web replaced by apps doesn't leave any room for that.

* The web is open and universal. This gives it infinitely more resilience than apps- if Apple were to fall into the sea, an entire ecosystem would be lost. As is, the web practically guarantees nothing can ever die permanently.

About the only weak point that the web has, is that it's more difficult to effectively monetize one-time payments, but that's why everyone and their sister is going to subscription models, or are working within an established marketplace.

rpedela• 13 years ago

Yeah I generally agree with you. My view is that mobile will follow the desktop in terms of apps. Once upon a time, most apps were native to the desktop. Then the networks got fast enough and the browsers and tools got good enough that you could build most native desktop apps as websites. Once the mobile networks get fast enough, and the mobile browsers and tools get a bit better then I think you will start seeing mobile apps being built as websites too.

The main problem websites solve over native is the fact you only have to build the app once and it works everywhere (mostly). Of course, there will always be a place for native apps, regardless of desktop or mobile, when performance matters most.

I think you are already starting to see it happen actually with mobile-first web frameworks like Bootstrap, some mobile browsers performing well (i.e. Chrome), and 4G rolling out. But it is definitely just starting assuming I am right.

waps2• 13 years ago

Which apps exactly, aside from shopping and maybe encyclopaedias, have migrated to the web ?

Desktop publishing ? Nope

IDEs ? Nope

CAD ? Nope

3D modeling ? Nope

Mathematical tools ? Nope

So which ones ?

pjbrunet6• 13 years ago

Mobile has all kinds of problems:

1. Battery life is a joke and that's not going to change.

2. Tiny screen is still tiny. Big screen is more useful.

3. Finger is not the best pointing device.

4. 90% of mobile is games. The market has spoken, smartphone is a toy. Only people that can't afford Internet access (kids & 3rd world) use their phone for everything.

5. Privacy/security is bad from so many angles. Still waiting for an Ubuntu phone.

6. Android is a Linux OS that blocks Linux applications--what BS. If you work at Google, shame on all of you.

7. Processing power is weak. As we're seeing with cryptocoins, don't forget the value of raw computational power.

8. Limiting keyboard. Pressing alt-function to get something simple like an "=" sign is a huge waste of time.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

(1) 1.5h used to be good enough for a laptop, not that long ago.

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_High-Definition_Link

(3) http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Tablet-Mouse-Android-910-0026...

(6) No, it doesn't. I'm running ssh, git-annex and other Linux applications on my Nexus 7.

I won't disagree about the privacy problems and poor processing power, but I doubt those are real impediments for mobile devices to become the standard, even if it means I'll keep my desktop.

(EDIT: Of course, the "death" of the PC is a silly idea. But I can see it become a professional tool with a small hobbyist market, instead of the consumer market we have now.)

nl• 13 years ago

None of that matters.

Go read "The Innovator's Dilemma".

neave• 13 years ago

There's no reason why native apps and the mobile web can't peacefully coexist and thrive. There isn't going to be a "winner." It's not a zero-sum game. The future will be more of what we have today: more apps, more websites, more devices. But nothing is going to die, or be killed off by the other.

quaunaut2• 13 years ago

I agree. Hence why I said I didn't think Apps were going anywhere either.

Apps have a lot of really cool strengths. But killing the web- that's something people who have trouble seeing long term trends say.

aplummer• 13 years ago

Apps will kill the web exactly like T.V killed radio and cinemas.

rwhitman• 13 years ago

So the most powerful tool for the open sharing of information since the advent of the printing press, that has transformed the way we live forever, will now be discarded because people are using computers in the form of handheld devices instead of Windows PCs? Is that what they are trying to say here?

I disagree.

waps2• 13 years ago

The game is called "which is cheaper", and mobile wins.

solnyshok2• 13 years ago

desktop is cheaper. for the price of one top smartphone, I can have a top notch desktop that would serve me for 5 years, which cannot be said about smartphones

nly3• 13 years ago

The Web frankly just isn't evolving as quickly as mobile app platforms. HTML5 feels like ancient history, despite not even becoming a final recommendation yet and, imho, the rise of the gigantic javascript frameworks just shows the existing platform is sorely lacking... all it really demonstrates is the power of having a client you can push code to easily.

Where's my standard, secure browser UI and API for secure payments using my credit card? We've been using the web to shop for 20 years and it still sucks.

Where's decent standard authentication worthy of this millennium, let alone this decade?

Why don't we yet have date picker and other form widgets that actually work across browsers?

Why are bespoke markup languages like MathML and SVG actually failing or seeing less and less adoption?

teleclimber• 13 years ago

When things are new they tend to evolve very fast. It's normal. The web is evolving nicely for something that's 20+ years old.

By the way why do we need a "standard UI" for taking credit cards? Is there a single open platform out there that has a "Standard UI" for making payments?

spo81rty• 13 years ago

I prefer to use PayPal on websites that accept it so I don't have to go find my wallet. I buy stuff on Amazon instead of other sites because it already has all my info and I don't have to type it. Making processing payments as simple as possible helps streamline them and make them easier on the consumer.

trycatch• 13 years ago

Why are bespoke markup languages like MathML and SVG actually failing or seeing less and less adoption?

? Native MathML is soon going to be used by Wikipedia by default [1]. SVG adoption increased ~4x in the last year [2].

[1] http://www.maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic/?post/2...

[2] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/im-svg/all/all

nly3• 13 years ago

MathML isn't supported at all by IE, Chrome or Opera (even pre-Chromium port?) and Google have said they don't intend on supporting it natively. This means you're looking at e.g. MathJax to plug the hole with Javascript.

Using huge JavaScript frameworks to create complex apps is one thing, but its rather sad when you have to use them just to create documents.

Link [2] also shows that more sites are using BMP than SVG. So while I may be wrong on adoption waining, I'm not exactly pleased with the way rich formats are progressing on the web... it's fairly easy to go from 0.25% coverage to 0.1% coverage.

bhauer• 13 years ago

As a consumer, I hope he is wrong. As a producer, I believe he is wrong.

As a consumer with a high-spec PC with multiple large monitors, a good phone, and two tablets, I strongly prefer consuming all content on my PC. It's faster—by a massive margin, easier to navigate, easier to read, easier to simultaneously consume two or more content items (video + text content, for example), easier to pair consumption with production. It's better in every single content consumption metric that matters to me. It has a lot of room for improvement (see my previous rants about monitors), and I feel the lack of innovation in desktop computing is precisely why it's flagging. But that has more to deal with lack of innovation in desktop computing and less to do with mobile versus desktop.

As a producer, there is no comparison. In a pinch, I can produce work product on my Surface Pro or, in an even tighter pinch, on my Venue 8 Pro. But every moment I do so, I will be longing to be back home in front of my desktop computer. Unless of course I am on vacation in some beautiful environment.

Speaking of, I often feel there is a myopic view of computing that says mobile is workable for work production because the people making the decisions are those who can be mobile—they travel extensively and don't produce a whole lot. They may be creative, but they are not the creators. For the rest of us, we spend a lot of time at home or at an office, two locations where we easily can install high-performance desktop computing in one form or another.

Like others here, I don't care a whole lot precisely what is behind the screens, keyboard, mouse; behind the projectors, hand gesture inputs, and so on. I don't care if it's a PC in a big ATX case, a NUC or Brix, or a mobile device that I dock on a charging plate with wireless HDMI. What matters is that I can break free of its mobileness, making it a device with a large screen, a full-size keyboard, and a high-precision pointing device such as a mouse. That is desktop computing, and it will evolve.

Yeah, for me, I hope he is wrong because his model of computing is one that doesn't align with my preferences. Furthermore, in the computing model I long for, all my mobile devices become subservient to a singular "computer" that runs my applications. One of those applications will be a web browser.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

Speaking of, I often feel there is a myopic view of computing that says mobile is workable for work production because the people making the decisions are those who can be mobile—they travel extensively and don't produce a whole lot. They may be creative, but they are not the creators. For the rest of us, we spend a lot of time at home or at an office, two locations where we easily can install high-performance desktop computing in one form or another.

What kind of "work" are you reffering to? I know top programmers, photographers, musicians, video editors that work from their laptops, either at home but also on the road. Work as in, deliver final results to customers.

If they, with their increased demands, can do that, who wouldn't, and what exactly do you do?

Swizec• 13 years ago

A laptop is a mightily different beast than a tablet or a phone. Laptops are PC's. There's a full-sized keyboard, high precision pointing device, and even a very decent screen.

None of that exists on things people think when they say "mobile".

I'm trying to say that a laptop fits every single specification parent poster gave for a useful device that can break free of its mobileness. It's even got magnificent practical support for multi-tasking.

Yeah sure we can "multitask" on tablets and phones these days, but the UX is a joke. Just trying to cross-reference two different websites, or a skype conversation and a website, is downright painful on a true mobile device.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

Meh, I've seen a lot of people who are very skilled in their respective fields, but are extremely slow in doing anything with a computer. This is especially true when someone is using a trackpad.

walshemj• 13 years ago

I think you find that these "top" creatives might well have a laptop or two for on site work but will have big traditional PC back at base.

For example in music a proper studio will use a desktop pc (or multipel PC's) as the heart of its DAW - with the laptop used for performance/playback rather than creation.

I bet Air Studios or Abbey Road will be using MAC pros's and not Laptops

jotm• 13 years ago

PC's won't go away, but they will become a specialty item (mostly for producers, scientists and probably gamers).

That's because the average user (http://i.imgur.com/UVMV7ZB.gif) doesn't care about all of its capabilities - they just want a Web browser and maybe a document editor. They don't see the point of multiple monitors, SSDs, separate storage servers and other accessories.

A tablet that can connect to their TV is more than enough, and that's what the future of PC for the average user is going to be IMO.

pjbrunet6• 13 years ago

"producers, scientists and gamers"

You're really over-simplifying here. Just go to McDonalds and count all the screens. Order tracking terminals, animated menus, registers, back office--must be 12 screens in there just to sell burgers.

pjbrunet6• 13 years ago

Exactly. If your job is reply "Yes" or "No" or "OK" that's great for mobile but not realistic for most of us in the trenches.

__pThrow2• 13 years ago

I think the PC's Death in the marketplace is due to the PC being given over to more and more web apps and the power of current PCs being nowhere near the bottleneck it once was.

When there are compelling apps and net bandwidth that requires higher performing PCs, we'll see PC sales trend upwards again.

aufreak3• 13 years ago

This seems to be a really important question out there and I'm somewhat scared by the silence on HN about this. The silence makes me think that folks are going "oh shit!" with frozen fingers.

It does looks like the incentives are aligned in the direction laid out in the article. Companies can better control their user experience on mobile through uncrawlable apps. You hear "mobile first" a lot these days. These things are with users for longer than desktops/laptops. Anyone can carve out a section of the web where content gets created, but cannot be linked to.

The two gaps I see are -

a) mobile devices are good for _consumption_, but are not yet on par with *tops for _creation_, and

b) reputation systems on the internet (currently) require linking, and there's nothing to replace that in the mobile world.

wmeredith2• 13 years ago

This seems like a non-argument. Most apps are used to access the web in some manner. It's like saying cars will kill roads.

johnwalker2• 13 years ago

They're distinguishing between the web (DOM, browser space) and the internet. So the claim isn't that services will go away, it's that people will increasingly write apps instead of HTML.

wmeredith2• 13 years ago

Yeah, that sort of makes sense. But if that's the angle then web browsers are just another app accessing the internet. I don't think any of it is going anywhere.

andrewhillman• 13 years ago

I believe with the rapid advancements in mobile frameworks and responsive design the desktop and mobile web will converge. Not every startup needs a native mobile app.

If you believe the desktop web is dead... Throw out all your desktops/ laptops and give everyone in your company iPads and see how productive your company is. It won't be pretty.

belluchan• 13 years ago

Question for anyone really: how many different websites did you visit today, and how many different apps did you use today? Is that number even remotely equal? Do you think you'd ever want as many as the former as apps installed on your phone?

ericd2• 13 years ago

Probably 30 websites and 1 app, which happens to have a very good web version (Google Maps).

pan69• 13 years ago

Name me one app hat doesn't use HTTP.

The web is more than websites. Personally I believe apps will be long gone before the web will be. It's already starting with the gazillion of apps you need to install these days with most of them that should just have been websites.

clarky07• 13 years ago

The PC and the web aren't dying anytime soon. PC sales aren't going to 0. They are simply at a point where they are good enough to last a bit longer than they used to. With the replacement cycle getting lengthened, sales go down. They will plateau though. Nobody is stopping using pc's altogether. At worst people will be buying convertible laptop/tablets. iPad is awesome, but it doesn't solve all problems.

The web, like pc's, is also not going to die anytime soon. Linking between apps is far too complicated, and finding things without Google would suck. If you know exactly what you are looking for, perhaps apps work for that. It is the equivalent of type in direct traffic though. Otherwise, you are going to google to find something specific, or twitter/facebook, to find something random. Each of those things require the linking of the internet. You may or may not use the built in browser much, but you will use the browser view in those apps to consume the content that is out there.

mark-r• 13 years ago

Short term you're probably right. Longer term I think tablet capabilities will increase to a point that is unimaginable today. Meanwhile the contraction in PC sales will absolutely stall the innovation that PCs will need to compete.

craigvn• 13 years ago

At that point what is the difference between a PC and a tablet. There are hybrid devices now, are they PC's or tablets? I think when people say PC they often mean the brown box under a desk. I agree that they days of that are limited as increasingly powerful machines can fit in a small box, you can already hook up a Surface tablet to multiple monitors and keyboard and operate just like a PC. As a developer I don't think we should even think about these things, we just need to support them all popular platforms without getting hangups over the names.

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

With the replacement cycle getting lengthened, sales go down. They will plateau though.

Fewer PCs are being replaced at all. The PC market freefall will reach a non-PC bottom, but this market size might be more appropriate of a workstation market than the old mass PC market.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

PCs and non-general-purpose computing are headed for a divorce, and rightly so.

PCs started as general-purpose computing for people who needed general-purpose computing. Now, 90%+ of PC users, if asked if they need general-purpose computing will go "Uh. Sure. Whatever."

The population of the open Web, with open standards, will shrink alongside the population of people who actually need a Personal Computer under their total and complete control.

90% of people want a game, a pop song, and a movie. And the publishers of those products don't want them to steal their products. Some of that 90% will break in the direction of open culture, on an open Web. But not most of them.

banachtarski• 13 years ago

This is a silly deduction from flawed assumptions. PC sales don't necessarily correlate to PC usage! I don't know a single person that doesn't use a PC from day to day, including my nontechnical friends.

ams6110• 13 years ago

One reason that at least partly explains the decline in new PC shipments is that nowadays, a three or four year old (or even older) PC is still plenty good enough for what most people do with it. My newest computer at home is a mid-2007 iMac and it's absolutely fine for everything I do.

johnwalker2• 13 years ago

I actually agree with this article. It's a lot more trouble to wait for the web to standardize than it is to support a couple different versions of an app, which usually has potential to offer a better user experience anyway. (More developer jobs, too!) This really shouldn't be troubling to anyone.

ericd2• 13 years ago

People who make things don't want to have to make them multiple times. That was one of the main reasons that devs hated IE6 - you essentially had to redo or make a shadow version of whatever you'd already done to get it to work for everyone.

paul9290• 13 years ago

PCs probably will go the way of dodo bird but not the web.

Nowadays you can built cross compatible mobile and desktop web apps. Ones that are cutting edge.

We just released our streaming web app and launched it on iOS and any device running Chrome.

Further as an interactive/audience participation app it's much easier to get people to join/use your app via a URL then asking them to download an app. Here's some recent press if interested http://bit.ly/1l6QCoH.

Anyway this article's tone is a bit over the top.

AmVess• 13 years ago

They still sell 300+ MM of the things globally; PC's aren't going anywhere. The market will shrink to allow room for other players (tablets, etc), but it will never die off.

I've been reading about the death of the PC since the early 90's...and I'm still waiting for them to go Tango Uniform.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

It's hard to think of an app that is more device-centric than Dropbox, which exists solely to sync files between devices. And yet, it has a web interface.

Think of the most popular mobile apps. Do they have a web interface? Chances are, unless it is a game, the answer is probably yes. Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Google Maps, Pandora, YouTube, etc.

The Web is not going away. It's just becoming the default, lowest-common-denominator channel.

Roboprog• 13 years ago

Well, I certainly hope that future tablets have general purpose docking stations and enough capabilities to drive MS Windows forever from the home. I can do quite a bit on my Nexus 7 with a bluetooth keyboard already, but it needs a way to set it on a table and connect (with or without wires) to a larger monitor and other peripherals when I'm home. And it needs 200 to 300 GB storage instead of 32 GB.

How having an OS that doesn't drain the life out of low wattage CPUs will kill the web I'm not sure. Mac and Windows have apps, but we still use the browser for a lot of things on those. (Linux sort of has apps)

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Is there a name for ridiculous fallacious arguments like this, the "x is on a slight decline... so x or y is going to completely disappear"? It's just basic errors in extrapolation, like these, just the inverse:

http://xkcd.com/605/

http://xkcd.com/1007/

Go to any coffee shop, or any workplace, and you'll see a sea of laptops. The PC isn't going anywhere. Neither is the web. The PC isn't even turning "niche". Tablets have their place, maybe purchased devices will settle down into a 50/50 or even 80/20 balance of tablets/laptops, but then it'll just stay there. Tons of people's jobs, tasks, and hobbies depend on full-fledged PC's -- normal everyday people I'm talking about.

stinos• 13 years ago

I recall this obvious reasoning error, because that indeed is what it is, is listed here: http://www.logicalfallacies.info/ (sorry I don't have time at the moment to go through it, so I'll leave that as a small exercise for you)

maxwin• 13 years ago

I don't think that's what he meant. Nobody is naive enough to predict that the web is going away completely. But as more and more people who previously consume content from the web migrate to mobile, the web as we know it will slowly get marginalized.

glimmung• 13 years ago

This is the most witless piece I've read on Wired for a long time. The web is the lowest common denominator of content delivery, and is the foundation of many apps and most content - whether the content is delivered to a browser or an app.

The embedded tweet that says: "twitter will be for content. The web is going away because laptops and browsers are." is hilarious. Is all our content going to be in 140 character chunks? If not, in the absence of the web, how will a tweet link to content? That very tweet nicely illustrates the uselessness of a tweet to say anything of substance or with precision.

graycat• 13 years ago

Yes, the media people need a 'story'.

Yup, media people whose first and only personal contact with computing was a smart phone can buy into the idea that "The PC’s Death".

That's about as likely as a Tesla car putting SUVs, pickup trucks, delivery vans, 18 wheel trucks, and freight trains out of business.

A smart phone can't replace my PC, not nearly.

Let's see: 'Wired' is owned by Conde-Nast which also publishes, what, women's fashion magazines? Figures!

teh_klev2• 13 years ago

Maybe the real reason for the decline in PC sales is that we're keeping them for longer, because the hardware has finally gotten well ahead of Microsoft or Apple's best efforts to bleed every cycle out of the machines with more "features"?

I'm still running the same Dell Precision T5400 workstation that I got back in early 2008'ish. It's got 2 x Xeon E5450's (3Ghz 4 core), 12GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS card and a pair of SSD's (these were a recent upgrade). In fact I have two of these boxes, the other has a single processor. The dual processor one I picked up for a song on ebay as a refurb. There's a lot of good solid refurb/second hand kit to be had out there still under warranty for peanuts. As a consumer, why buy new?

To this day it still runs Windows 7 (was Vista), VS2012, VirtualBox and a load of bloaty stuff without feeling slow. Hell I can even run four Eve clients at a decent quality across two 24" displays and the box doesn't feel sluggish, though my video card could probably do with an upgrade.

I have a tablet as well but I still prefer (as do many of my non-techy friends) doing serious work on a desktop.

SilkRoadie• 13 years ago

PC sales are declining because more people are realising that they do not need one. They can do most things - surf web, consume content - more comfortably on a tablet which is a fraction of the cost of a decent computer.

Your point also holds true, PC owners are upgrading less often also.

As for the web dying it depends on your circle I guess. My partner doesn't have a smart phone.. she does have an iPad but doesn't make use of the App Store and instead uses the camera and Safari daily. My parents have smart phones and tablets but hardly use apps. Instead relying on browsers and their laptop do any real work. I can only think of one or two friends who use apps out side of standard mail, navigation, twitter and facebook.

I think a lot of tech people are stuck in a bubble, surrounded by other tech savvy people who are ultra dependant on technology and app's in particular which leads to sweeping statements like "the web is dying." I see little evidence to support such an idea at the moment.

teh_klev2• 13 years ago

"I think a lot of tech people are stuck in a bubble, surrounded by other tech savvy people who are ultra dependant on technology and app's in particular which leads to sweeping statements like "the web is dying." I see little evidence to support such an idea at the moment."

Totally agree with this (from the perspective of a web hoster), I think there's a few folks who need to get out of "the valley" a bit more.

QuantumGood• 13 years ago

Watch what the kids do to predict the future of the web.

grey-area• 13 years ago

The web is not tied in any way to the desktop PC, in fact the rise of mobile is partly down to the ease with which people could switch to a new device and still have access to all their data, via the web. All Apple had to add to the iPhone to make it incredibly useful was a usable web browser, and the same will be true of our watches in 2018, paper thin news readers in 2020, or phones in 2030.

Mobile binaries written to a specific binary API will have a hard time competing with the web, because of its radical simplicity and backwards/forwards compatibility. Of course the web will change, but I don't think it has much to fear from binary applications (desktop or mobile) - we've been down that road before, and we know where it leads.

Platform independence is the web's most important feature, and as mobile ecosystems proliferate then consolidate, and hardware improves performance, I think we'll see consumers and producers reevaluating their choice to stay locked in to a world overseen by one corporate vendor.

jbb555• 13 years ago

The PC isn't dead. And it's not dying. Will people stop repeating that.

Sales have reduced because - 1) Some tasks that never needed a PC people can do on other devices now. 2) People don't need to buy a new one every 18 months any more.

It's SALES of new PC that's have dropped, not the PC is dying. People still use their PCs... They just keep them for longer.

Ugh

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Why everybody is giving PC shipments as arguments FFS? Give total commissioned PCs in use that connected and using internet. Total bandwidth consumed by PC. It is much more important metric for the health of the PC ecosystem (and not market).

A PC bought now could last a decade for web browsing. When the number of decommissioned PCs start outpacing the total shipments - then it is time to worry.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

I see PC sales, as they have been, as a sort of blip bubble, which happened while proper simple consumer devices were developed. Now we have such devices, PCs are less and less necessary for day to day uses. So, as time goes on the PC sales should shrink back to the people that actually need them. But then the problem there is that PCs would become more expensive since the volumes go down massively.

My experience has been like that. 20 (these number are very guessed) years ago, no one cared. 15 years ago people began to get interested. 10 years ago, everyone in my house had to have a PC. Now, most of us use tablets or phones, but we still have 2 PCs that get used when tablets are not appropriate. I personally use a PC 95% of the time. One of my kids who is a heavy gamer uses his PC 99% of the time. The rest of the house, however, use tablets 95% of the time. All those old PC are now gone. (Much better round the house now, less desk space and wire required. Mrs Me is now much happier!! Also, less power consumed. Less noise, less heat.)

The bit that bothers me is that back when all my kids used PCs, they nosed around the machine and discovered things like programming. Using a tablet is so focused, that natural discovery is lost. The tablet is just a thing they to use to consume. Another problem is that if a tablet user asks about how to program, they have to leave the tablet that they are used to and have to sit at this big PC box thing, which is for them a whole mental shift, and is there for possibly off putting.

But overall it seems to me that PC sales will and should decline in favour of tablets because PCs are OTT for the task of consuming the internet. Game wise, consoles are over all easier to use.

Using a PC is or was like using an aircraft carrier instead of a speed boat, until someone invented the speed boat. Now most people buy speed boats, and the navy can have their carriers back!!!!

pyalot2• 13 years ago

Rampant humbug again from Wired (a web puplication, written and editorialized on personal computers).

Even if you discount the horrible fragmentation in mobile devices, and the difficulty this creates for developers to deploy apps, any apps, there still remains the sheer growth of the web.

"The Web", what is that? A simple answer is it's: The internet + a browswer. So is the internet going to die? Nope, that's growing every year, and a majority of the worlds population hasn't gotten in on it yet. Are browsers dying? Nope, any device imaginable these days comes with a browser. It's become unthinkable to make a device without a browser.

So if neither of those is dying, how come the web should be dying? Because Wired, that's why. It doesn't have to make sense, just has to be sensationalist enough to drive more web-views, how ironic, really, wired.

fulafel2• 13 years ago

This article is about Windows!

Only Windows laptop sales have declined, Apple had a big increase. Linux numbers aren't reported but wouldn't be representative anyway because it's usually forcibly bundled.

Nobody is going to miss desktop Windows. Except your corporate IT department, and maybe gamers.

dualogy• 13 years ago

Except your corporate IT department, and maybe gamers

Ah, just the two major mass-markets par excellence then..

fulafel2• 13 years ago

Yeah, from hardware trade POV but not from the consensual user base point of view.

prima-facie• 13 years ago

This is inflamatory and wrong on so many levels. Don't forget that the web is the network platform on which apps are built upon.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

So we're going to stop publishing to the web and squeeze all of our content into 140 char tweets? Right.

abhi3188• 13 years ago

let the html5 vs native debate start in 3..2..1..

return0• 13 years ago

The web is searchable. Apps are not. Case closed.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

I think PCs sales are going to continue to go way down, if you are not including laptops as PCs. Can't imagine people will stop buying laptops anytime soon. I don't really know about the web.

Its better to have a simple API for standard things that can work across platforms without coding multiple versions of the same application. We basically have that now in the web platform.

Its also better to be able to quickly load an application on demand. Again, we have that with the web platform.

Its better to have a straightforward way to look up information (Google, on the web) and to link between information and applications (the web).

What the web platform is missing is native performance and some (not all) native mobile capabilities like easy payments and application access. Its also missing some things like the security model of mobile applications.

The internet is an open system, but it is still using a centralizing client-server model.

What we need is something like the web/internet that is not server-based but data-oriented, peer to peer, and encrypted. Not centralized.

I believe that there are a number of technologies that could come together to merge all of the features we want into a new platform.

Whether we will actually end up with this idealized platform I don't know. I wouldn't assume that will happen. If I had resources I could try to push things in that direction.

blueskin_3• 13 years ago

I'll believe it when I see it.

Phones and glorified browsers will only ever be useful as dumb terminals (and the latter becomes a brick when away from a connection). Even if it goes back to the 90s where many people don't own a (real) computer, computers will still exist as many things aren't possible to do without one.

mathattack• 13 years ago

There is a sense that more of something means less of something else. Perhaps this is true in terms of market share, but it doesn't happen to be true in devices.

TVs didn't kill talk radio, though radio may have shrunk.

The PC didn't kill TV, though TV may have been augmented, and perhaps shrunk.

Mobiles didn't kill PCs, though PC use may have shrunk.

This idea that the web will be completely replaced by Facebook and mobile apps is crazy. It's just another layer in a multi-technology world.

Executor• 13 years ago

Curious - How do you get the ability to downvote articles?

The PC’s Death Might Also Mean the Web’s Demise

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