PC Doom and Gloom Continues in a New Decade

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A Look Back at the Last Decade

In December, I didn’t end up writing an article of any kind. I thought I knew what I wanted to write, I hinted at it, but then I found other blogs discussing it (and I feel getting it wrong) and I figured my little fan theory mentioned in a previous post wasn’t even worth writing about. It’s just not my style or anything I’ve ever been invested in. What I AM invested in is me! I’ve been focusing on myself since my motorcycle accident and not worrying about fictional deadlines for videos that will get 5 views, and blog posts 3 people will read. I reminded myself that this website is an outlet for me, not a “job” of any kind. It’s a hobby. And it should remain that way. But I digress.

After all of that, I just wanted to call out this ZDNet article about “The End of Windows 7” being “the end of the PC era.

That reminds me of an article I wrote all the way back in 2012 in response to a similar hyperbolic “death off the PC” type of article. In my post, I mentioned “last quarter, over 400 million PCs were sold. In the last four years or so, only about 30 million iPads have been sold. In the worst three months of PC sales history, PCs still outsold iPad’s entire life-span by more than 300%.”

While I don’t have the figures in front of me at the moment, I’m sure smart phones as a market are booming, but I still don’t think the reports of the end of the PC era are true. I just don’t. We haven’t truly found the next type of computing. Voice assistants have tried, VR has tried over and over, and mobile is great for social networking and a few other tasks, but Pixar isn’t making movies on phones, workplaces aren’t installing Microsoft Word on all of their employee’s phones and skipping out on laptops. According to Microsoft, over a billion Windows machines still exist in the world. We’re a far cry from “dead.”

Looking back at the last decade, I explained what Microsoft’s plan for Windows 8 was, and I still feel that I was correct. I tried to break down the problems with Windows 8, and talk about how overthought the new “Start Screen” had been. I talked about the ways Microsoft’s various teams had pulled the rug out from under me, and even proffered that Chromium based Edge, due to hit main stream tomorrow, may have been in development longer than we know.

At the end of the day my interest in tech hasn’t changed. My personal interest in computing is definitely not dwindling, and I’m more invested than ever in keeping up with the industry, both for my job and for personal reasons. That’s why I’m glad to affirm my stubborn belief that we are still not in a post-PC era.