iOS 5 is a big step in the end of the “PC”. Up until now, if you had an iPhone, you needed a Mac or PC to activate the phone and do the software installation. iOS 5 breaks that connection. Now if you have a wireless connection, iOS can “sync to the cloud” instead of syncing to a disk drive on your PC/MAC. (At least I think so)
If I wasn’t doing software development, it would be really tempting to just power down the PC and buy an iPad and live in the cloud. HP is getting out of the PC business for a reason. 97.62% of all home users can do everything they need to do without needing a PC, according to a study conducted by the Internet Society for Dubious Fabricated Statistics.
Lets be careful of what we wish for. I remeber when, in the mid 90’s, the CEO of Oracle talked about “ensureing the revenue stream” for his and other tech companies. His idea was a computerless society with “smart terminals” where everything you needed would be available on the “World Wide Web” Well we now have “The Cloud” and it won’t be long before all your applications will be there. Can you say “PAY PER USE?” Not to mention the fact that big Brother will have a much easier time of monitoring your “stuff” thats in “The Cloud”
I agree that is the end game.
That being stipulated, I can’t imagine turning off my gmail account and going back to using Agent, Outlook, Pegasus, Eudora, etc…. to download email to my PC to keep on my hard disk. My ISP no longer does its own email and has outsourced it to Google.
I saw a headline for a story a few days ago – I didn’t read it so I don’t know the details – the story was “If you break the rules of Google’s Like+1, you lose access to all your Google services”. A while back I wrote the question (maybe it was a poll) – if Google cancels your account, do you cease to exist as a person? Over time, the significance of that question will grow larger and more obvious.
LoL, I guess I took a different look at this…I guess if you were an Android user you would have noticed this a very long time ago. We sat quietly and chuckled while “i” users had to use a computer to set up their phone.
But I guess being that iPhone users no longer have to do this then now it “REALLY” is the end of the PC, as if thousands had not being PCing from HTC’s for the past how many years? The Day I started up my first Android phone and signed in with my Google mail, and saw things starting to snyc I knew we had crossed the Event Horizon and we were headed down a rabbit hole.
Now then…all that aside…I remember that same speech from Larry Ellison telling us how we were all just going to be using terminals soon, all just hooked to a central server. Maybe he was ahead of his time, maybe not but I tend to think it’s going to be a mixed system for a very long time.
Cost and what you can deliver for that cost will be the big factor. I hear the next big version of Flash is supposed to deliver modern quality gaming and graphics through your browser. IF that’s the case and if a fairly lower powered “terminal” can do it then yeah you might start seeing really inexpensive terminals hit the marker or more than likely, included inside your HDTV.
However, I don’t see anytime soon where Flash or anything like it is going to be running The Old Republic, Assassian’s Creed or Rage. Or for that matter running Adobe Premier, Autocad (whatever edition they are up to now) or what have you. Some people are always going to want or need power and if they want it they will pay for it and it will sell.
Business users are going to still use PCs, at least for some things. What’s going to change though is critical mass. If a significant number of home users and some portion of business applications move to mobile devices, tablets, smart phones etc… the motivation for people to improve PCs, and especially to develop applications for it will fall off. It will be a one way drop, just like nobody is predicting a return to 56k dialup internet access.
Back in 1977 at my first job, most of my coworkers were still coding by writing their code on coding specification sheets, waiting a couple days for the keypunch department for the cards to come back (with the sequence numbers in case you dropped the deck). Another day or two for the corrections to be done. While there was a keypunch machine available to us, we were strong discouraged from “wasting our time” creating our own card decks.
They set up a little room that had a few 3270 terminals and a program called FSE (Full Screen Editor) that ran under TSO. As my first “real” program to test my skills to figure out which group to assign me to, I was given a program that accepted cards describing the cables within a nuclear power plant, and my program had to access a database and print out forms showing each wire in the cable and what it connected to on both ends.
The people in the group who knew their database system and how it all worked, estimated for an experienced person to write the program would take a month. I sat in the TSO room all day and had the program finished in 3 days. I only printed out a listing of the code a couple times – no waiting for turnaround from the printer room or hoping my job would make it through the RJE workstation in less than a few hours.
The TSO room had a set of rules – since it was a scarce resource, there was a waiting list kept by the phone. When you were done, you called the next person on the list. You were supposed to limit the amount of time you used a terminal.
As late as 1982, I was still having the discussion of “You know, some day we’ll get to the point were every person will have their own terminal sitting on their desk” which was met with “Sure it will…. haha”…. the IBM PC as terminal hanging from a LAN changed the economics overnight. Most people were not using the PC for anything except a cheap terminal.
Apple’s “Control Freak” attitude toward software may ultimately be their undoing. Apple putting itself in the position of picking and choosing which applications are allowed on their devices is a big problem – especially for the corporate world, who doesn’t want some drone at Apple “reviewing” an in-house application.
Apple being big brother does give me a little warm feeling that apps are less likely to have “surprises” inside them, but not so much. I don’t have an iPad yet – just played with a relative’s one for a short time.
If I was to sum it up in a single anecdote, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying “If you want to look at porn, buy an Android” as Apple was cleansing itself of questionable content. There is the world the way you wish it might be and the world as it is.
You start with telling adults they should not using your device to view porn, and pretty soon you’re banning applications because you don’t like a cartoonish image of President Obama and Nancy Pelosi. I’m not in a big hurry to get anything new, but I’m not part of the “Apple Family”.
This is a sad (or maybe realistic, i don’t know) commentary on humanity but I’ve thought for years that the boom PC/internet speed/graphical performance in the late 80s and 90’s was due to Porn and Gaming. It was almost like some unspoken “moonshot” in the collective unconscious to have insta-porn.
Just like going to the moon, sure we got all sorts of amazing technology that developed from attaining that goal but left to it’s own development, would video on demand really have developed as fast, I’m just not sure. Isn’t it also curious as to now that we pretty much do have insta-porn that the PC speed race has slowed down. That and the fact that almost all gaming has moved to consoles.
That critical mass you talked about is pretty close I think and probably will be some sort of “Box” that you buy like you buy a microwave when you get a new apartment or new house. Maybe something that just Wi-fi’s to your flatscreens…or maybe is just part of the flatscreen.
One of the search engines (Lycos?) used to have an option that lets you watch a random sampling of the stream of search requests in real time. What people say they use the internet for and what they actually do with it are very different things.
For a long time, I dabbled with creating a search engine and had a spider that wasn’t “censored” and followed links in a reasonable way to follow interest. I created a web site with the “top 100 most important web pages about”…. grouped by topic. One page of that web site listed sex related web sites. Homestead revoked the account because of that. Doing that probably is what provoked me to get my own dedicated server so I would not be subject to arbitrary TOS decisions. Reality is what it is, unless it isn’t.
Fortenbras, you are correct.
At one time, I was a dbms consultant for The Firm… ’nuff said.
A large part of the build-out of the ISP, hosting, dial-up, and broadband infrastructure was essentially paid for on the back of the ‘Adult Industry’, as they call it. A lot of the players were the same people who brought you the 800/900/011 services, including a great many of the smaller telcos… who were merely the ‘front’ (fall-guys) for the large carriers (ATT, Sprint, MCI). Thus, they were supremely positioned to take advantage of access/billing.
Usually, they held a parallel conference in ‘Vegas at the same time as the CES (Consumer Electronics Show). In 1999 it was still called Audiotext… I saw streaming technology that took 4-5 years to make it to the end-users. The name of the conference has since been changed to reflect the internet focus.
Of course, the -real- deals are not made on the conference floor, that’s for the krill. The whole U.S. scene was (is?) controlled by maybe 10 players. One of them made a cameo on the Sopranos, as himself… playing high-stakes poker as usual. Mag publishers were slow to adapt to the internet, LFP (Larry Flynt) was first among the big 3. Their next target is your smart phone.