IS DESKTOP COMPUTING DEAD? by Pranav Dixit
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This article was written for the Magazine Writing program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. IS DESKTOP COMPUTING DEAD? By Pranav Dixit “PCs are like trucks. Only a few people need them. Eventually, they will be supplanted by devices, smart devices like tablets and phones, which are like cars. Not everybody needs a truck, but everybody needs a car.” - Steve Jobs at an All Things Digital conference, 2010. When I walk into the Best Buy store in Union Square the day before Thanksgiving, the crowds are already jostling for space even though most discounts don’t kick in till the evening of the following day. A quick look at the first 10 people in the checkout line reveals the following: the first four people are buying iPads; two people are buying the iPhone 5S; three are buying assorted Android smartphones; and the last person is trying haul an oversized LED TV all by herself. No one is buying a computer. “When I started working here 3 years back, I’d say we had about 1 in 3 people coming in to get a laptop,” says Holly Stern, a Best Buy customer service rep who looks particularly frazzled that day. “Now, it’s like 1 in 10. They want tablets, mostly. And phones. We had a four-week waiting list for the iPhone 5S last month.” To use a Silicon Valley buzzword, desktop computing has been completely and thoroughly disrupted. It is, after all, the age of here and now, and no one wants to be chained to a desk or lug around a laptop anymore to check their email or play a game when they can easily accomplish a majority of these casual activities on smaller, smarter, devices. Last week, IDC, the market intelligence firm that makes all sorts of wild-sounding-but-generally- accurate predictions about the state of computing, released its forecasts for the global PC market for the rest of the year. It’s not a rosy picture. IDC estimates that PC sales for the rest of 2013 will fall 10.1% compared to 2012. Overall, 300 million computers were sold worldwide this year in contrast to 350 million last year. That’s about 25 million PCs each month. If those numbers don’t mean anything to you, get this: Apple sold over 10 million iPhones in a single weekend last month. And that was in the United States alone. Unsurprisingly, IDC went right ahead and branded 2013 as a “year of historically bad proportions” for the PC. So is the desktop dead? Apple fanatics and proponents of the “post-PC era” would like you to believe so. The reality, however, is a little more nuanced. Time for some myth-busting. Perception: Those numbers look grim. That means that no one’s buying computers. Desktops are doomed. Reality: While that’s the most obvious conclusion to jump to, let’s take a step back and look at where desktops sit in the larger scheme of things in the tech world. The fact is that computers are now the elderly denizens of the tech world. How elderly? Consider this: desktops haven’t changed in any significant way since 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh. Sure, you can buy a gorgeous 27-inch iMac that’s roughly a million times more powerful than the original one but the basic desktop philosophy is the same – your souped-up iMac still has a keyboard and a mouse, and windows that open and close, and menus and toolbars and icons. You still “boot it up” and “shut it down” once you’re done using it. And it still runs off a motherboard, RAM and a hard disk. PC hardware, according to Rajat Agarwal, editor of technology website Boy Genius Report, India, is now at a point where it simply doesn’t matter because it is “good enough”. Case in point? The Dell Presario desktop computer that I got when I was 17 and saw me through endless college papers and PowerPoint presentations. At that time, it breezed through video- editing and casual gaming. It kept me company during all-night Skyping sessions with family abroad. Eight years later, it struggles to play high-definition video, let alone edit it; and it doesn’t play newer games like Assassin’s Creed and Dead Space. But for most other things, it’s just fine. My parents still use it to email, Skype and browse the web. So if PC sales are plummeting, it’s not because people are replacing their older desktops with smartphones and tablets. They’re simply not replacing their machines as often as they used to. Perception: App developers simply don’t find the desktop as “exciting” as they once did. There hasn’t been any groundbreaking desktop app for years since all the buzz and the money is in mobile software. Reality: Paul Thurrott, one of the world’s most prolific Microsoft journalists, wrote an article in September titled The Death of The Windows Desktop, which quickly viral (and why wouldn’t it, with a headline like that). Here’s what he had to say about future of the desktop: The real reason the desktop is heading into oblivion is the fact that it is a “dead platform walking”, in the sense that it is no longer a vital, viable platform for legitimate developers. There is no example of a major new Win32 app from the past several years, whereas developers have embraced mobile apps and web apps en-masse. “Paul is a moron,” says Austin Carr, senior writer at Fast Company who has been covering both Apple and Microsoft for over a decade. “It’s insane to say that the desktop is going away. While it’s true that the desktop on its own is not a viable platform for people to develop software for, most major developers who develop for mobiles and tablets still do develop for the desktop.” Those developers who do ignore desktops ignore a huge amount of revenue potential from traditional computers. Roughly 49% of Facebook’s advertising revenue in the last quarter came from mobile ads, for instance. “Which means that if Facebook only developed for mobile, it would be chopping off a majority of its ad revenue,” says Carr. “And while it’s true that its long-term dependence of the desktop will decline, it’s too soon to take that leap.” Earlier this year, Mailbird, a newly launched email program for Windows, got rave reviews in the tech press. Releasing a desktop email program in an age when most of us either access email on our smartphones or simply in the browser when we use our computers, was a bold move. But CEO Andrea Loubier says that Mailbird had been envisioned as a desktop application since the beginning. “Desktop users seek productively,” she says. “They enjoy the feeling of being in control with a solid native tool, a productivity hub, if you will, that delivers a great experience, whether you’re checking mail, editing a photo or watching a movie.” Loubier quickly dismisses the trend of the desktop taking a backseat. “Everyone is always going to use the desktop,” she says. “Mobiles and tablets are great, but they’re simply sidekicks to the desktop platform. In addition, the market for mobile development is currently extremely saturated and competitive. No one is paying attention to the opportunities that exist for the desktop in terms of a building great apps.” Perception: Touchscreens are destroying desktop computing. Reality: In October, FOX News released a promo video for some “new, never-before-used newsroom technology” (their words, not mine) that they installed in their New York headquarters. “This is the place where viewers can watch us sort it all out as it happens,” says Shepard Smith in the video. Behind him is a surreal scene that could be right at home in Gulliver’s Travels: a bunch of really tiny people sit huddled in front of what looks like giant iPads. Closer inspection reveals that this is actually wrong. It’s a bunch of normal-sized people sitting in front gigantic, 55-inch touchscreen displays that Smith calls BATs. This, he says, is short for Big Area Touchscreens. Imps on the internet call it Big Ass Tablets. “Journalists will operate our new software from these new workstations,” says Smith as he waves an arm in the air to manipulate a giant wall of random videos. “They will sort through different tweets and other news sources to verify information before we put it out on air.” Whatever that means. One look at this ridiculous scene should be enough to convince anyone that while touchscreens are infiltrating every aspect of our lives, they will not kill traditional desktop computing any time soon (or ever). “There’s an established dynamic in the way a keyboard, mouse and an operating system that lets you have multiple windows open on a single screen and easily switch between them, interact with each other,” says Ed Bott, a technology journalist who writes The Microsoft Report on ZDNet.com. “Just because the way in which we use computers for productive purposes hasn’t really changed in over 20 years doesn’t mean it’s antiquated. Sometimes, things stick around because they simply work.” Bott says he knows reporters who can get by for days using only their tablets and smartphones, but he wouldn’t want to do that. “I like to come into my office to write. I like having a keyboard and a large monitor or two,” he says.