When was the last time you got excited about buying a desktop PC? Most likely, it’s been years. Long gone are the days when countless fans would pore over computer magazines comparing feeds, speeds and the relative merits of graphics processors. No longer does the technology wow factor follow every new generation of chips and speculate what’s coming next.
Today, buying a desktop PC is about as exciting as purchasing a toaster oven ! You know what it needs to do, you know the basic specs, you buy it, and then go about your business. There are plenty of reasons for this.
Standardization plays into it; desktop PCs are largely built from interchangeable components. Even more important is that the power of desktop PCs has far outstripped the capabilities of software. If you’ve bought a PC in the last several years for general-purpose computing, most of its computing power is untapped by currently existing software. So what’s the point of buying a new PC ?
For most PC-based software, the thrill is gone. Web-based applications and services are where the excitement is. All this doesn’t mean that hardware innovation is dead. It’s alive and well -- in fact, we live in a golden age of hardware innovation.
The iPhone and iPad, and other Android-based phones, BlackBerries, netbooks, lightweight notebooks like the MacBook Air -- there’s a long list of remarkable hardware being designed, and it shows no sign of letting up. If anything, it’s increasing. The competition in the mobile phone market is as fierce if not fiercer than had been among PC makers during the height of the PC innovation boom, with next-generation devices constantly leapfrogging one another.
Does this mean that desktop PCs are going away? Certainly not, although increasingly they are being replaced by laptops. It does mean, though, that the best engineers and developers are migrating to work on the Web and mobile devices rather than traditional PCs and client-based PC applications.
It also means that IT staff, from the top on down, need to take a hard look at the future and their own skill sets. The cloud is becoming more important than the hardware that runs the cloud. Mobile devices and alternate ways of accessing enterprise data are becoming more important than ever.
If IT staff doesn’t follow today’s innovations, even if those innovations don’t yet affect their jobs, they’ll ultimately find themselves in the same situation as PC hardware -- an easily replaced commodity. |
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