[OT] PC sales down

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 19 April 2017 at 17:47:50 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> On 04/13/2017 06:16 PM, Joakim wrote:
>>  From a certain point of view, you could say PC sales are only 
>> down 25%
>> from their peak, that's not dead yet.  But the chart I linked 
>> shows
>> their share of personal computing devices, including mobile, 
>> has dropped
>> from 78% to a little less than 14% over the last decade.  I'd 
>> call that
>> dying.
>
> In other words: It can only be considered "dying" if you 
> conveniently ignore certain facts, and instead look only at a 
> stat that doesn't show the full picture.

On the contrary, my point is "the full picture" shows sales as a 
share of computing devices dying, whereas only looking at the PC 
market alone is misleading. The mobile tidal wave has taken away 
sales that would have been PCs instead, likely more than 25% if 
we extrapolate out the former PC sales growth rate, rather than 
just compare to the peak.

Just as the underpowered PC once disrupted the market for 
minicomputers and UNIX workstations, mobile is doing the same to 
the PC.  Whereas people used to check their email, browse the 
web, and ogle facebook on their PCs before, they just use a 
mobile device for those former PC-only activities now.

And now that the mobile market is so much bigger than PCs, 
they're finally going after what remains of the PC market: those 
who want to get work done on a bigger screen which supports 
viewing multiple windows at once.  This isn't going to happen 
overnight, as it will take years to roll out Android 7.0 Nougat 
with built-in multi-window, get all the needed productivity 
software ported over (though the S8 announcement notes that 
versions of Office and Photoshop are already done), and keep 
iterating and improving on the mobile multi-window experience.

But just as the PC once disrupted the computing market, mobile 
has already disrupted the PC market.  Mobile taking most of the 
rest of the PC market's sales with these multiwindow moves is 
inevitable.  Sure, there will always be a few who run powerful 
desktops, just as I'm sure there's someone out there running a 
UNIX workstation, but you never run into those people anymore 
because they're such a small niche.

I don't know why you get so worked up about this.  Yes, the new 
entrant won't have features the old computers had.  I was using 
virtual desktops on UNIX workstations regularly decades ago, but 
Microsoft didn't add that to the OS till Windows 10 a couple 
years ago.  So what?  Most people got by just fine.