Every once in a while, Moore’s law withstanding and not, products get outdated or transformed. Many of us are wondering whether the age of the PC is over. Is small and sleek the order of the day?
Not so fast! From being the only one to one of the options and now to one of the many options, the PC is no longer in its preeminent position. Agreed that there are legitimate contenders such as the Smartphone, Tablet PC, Netbook, Smartbook and more. It is important to draw the distinction here that Desktops and conventional laptops fall in the same category of heavyweights, granted though that the key difference between them being mobility, essentially what we are comparing here is heavy against light. Most recently the netbooks seem to be taking away the last bastion of the PCs in terms of screen size and keyboard.
Apart from the hardware perspective, the growth of several new technologies has contributed to this state – the Web, Browsers, Cloud computing, delivery of Apps in the SaaS model.
What does all of these options mean for the Application developer……well as if the several browsers were not enough, this adds more complexity to design for different screen sizes, code for different operating systems and device constraints. Write once, run anywhere is not so easy!
But the PC will survive for quite a while morphing itself into various forms. From the consumer focus that led to billions of PCs, one in almost every affordable household and the birth of the giant called Dell, it will now transform into an application and utility focused tool with a defined target audience. Where computing power is crucial, the PC will still reign supreme! Engineering, Publishing, Research, Multimedia are all industries that need rich client side computing and they are not going to leave the PC anytime soon!
Tags: PC, Personal Computer
