PCs are still doomed and their end will come quicker than you think

It takes society thirty years, so so, to absorb a new information innovation into daily life. It took about that long to turn movable type into books in the fifteenth century. Telephones were invented in the 1870s however did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s yet became an important industry in the 1920s. Television, invented in the mid-1920's, took until the mid-1950s to bind us to our sofas.

The time that understanding is reached

By the time that understanding is reached, and personal computers have wormed into all our lives to an extent far greater than they are today, the whole concept of personal computing will probably have changed. That's the way it is with information technologies. It takes us quite a during to decide what to do with them.

Radio was invented with the original idea that it would replace telephones and give us wireless communication. That implies two-way communication, but how many of us own radio transmitters? Actually, the popularization of radio came as a broadcast medium, with powerful transmitters sending the same message -- entertainment -- to thousands or millions of inexpensive radio receivers. Television was the same way, envisioned at a glance as a two-way visual communication medium. Early phonographs could record as so then as play and were supposed to make recordings that would be sent through the mail, replacing written letters. The magnetic tape cassette was invented by Phillips for dictation machines, nevertheless we use it to hear music on Sony Walkmans. Telephones went the other direction, since Alexander Graham Bell first envisioned his invention being used to pipe music to remote groups of people.

Though I had no inkling of it back in 1992, what's rapidly replacing the PC in our culture is the smartphone. Today the PC industry and the smartphone industry are neck-and-neck in terms of size at around $250 billion each. However which one is growing faster?  In this regard, which one is growing at all? 

Now extend this trend another direction and you have the ascendant smart phone -- word for word a PC in your hand and growing ever more powerful thanks to Moore's Law.

Microsoft knows this on some level. Their reptilian corporate brain is beginning to comprehend what could be the end. That's why the company is becoming increasingly desperate for ways to maintain its central role in our digital lives. We see the first bet-the-company aspects of that in Redmond's recent decision to run the Windows 8 kernel all the way down to ARM-powered phones and tablets although it requires shedding features to do so.