On Monday, 30 October 2017 at 15:46:56 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
On Monday, 30 October 2017 at 13:32:23 UTC, Joakim wrote:
The decline itself doesn't imply a collapse, the collapse is
coming because the mobile market is looking for new growth
avenues and releasing mobile accessories like Samsung's DeX
dock or laptop replacements like the iPad Pro or this laptop
shell:
https://sentio.com
I look at this and just wonder why people wouldn't just have a
laptop.
Expense is one major reason, just buy a laptop shell for $150 and
connect it to the smartphone you already have. Another is that
most new apps are developed for mobile nowadays, since the PC
market is shrinking.
Mobile convergence killed off standalone mp3 players,
e-readers, GPS devices, point-and-shoot cameras, feature
phones, a whole host of former mobile single-purpose devices.
They're going after the PC now, with all the massive scale of
the mobile wave:
https://twitter.com/lukew/status/842397687420923904
Can the PC market withstand that tidal wave? I'm betting not.
And what does this show, a huge increase in smart phone/tablet
shipments and a modest decline in desktop sales. I don't
dispute this. Smart phones are leading to a huge increase in
the amount of people who use computers on a daily basis. A
whole bunch of people who use PCs may switch to just using
smartphones/tablets. However, some people do need and want
them. And they will continue to use them.
Yes, the question is how big is that group that will stick with
PCs: do you think it will be 5% of the peak 2011 sales of 350
million PCs or 50% by 2027? Right now, it's down to 75%, which
I'd call more than "modest," and keeps heading lower. For a
comparison, standalone, ie non-smartphone, camera sales are down
80% from their peak and keep plunging lower:
https://petapixel.com/2017/03/03/latest-camera-sales-chart-reveals-death-compact-camera/
I don't see how PCs can avoid a similar fate.
As for the average white collar worker in a decade, if they're
using Google Docs on their Samsung S18 connected to something
like that Sentio laptop shell, do you really imagine they
won't be able to get their work done? I think it's more
likely they're using software completely different than Office
or Docs to get their work done, as those suites are already
way outdated by now, but that's a different tangent.
Okay, but Google Docs isn't supported at my company. Microsoft
Office is. We have a huge number of Excel files that use a lot
of features that probably can't be ported over to Google Docs
without a bunch of work. They might be able to get us to make
new stuff with Google Docs, but we're still gonna need Excel
for all the old stuff (so why bother switching). There's a
reason why banks still use Cobol.
Excel is available on Android and the Samsung S8 too, along with
multiwindow use on the DeX desktop dock. Such legacy use will
indeed keep some old tech alive, but just as most don't use COBOL
anymore, most won't be using that old tech.
Now I would love to move everything to R/Python. It could be
done. But not everyone knows R/Python, but everyone knows
Excel. If I get hit by a bus, then someone can figure out what
I've done and get to work.
Sure, and they will likely be able to use it with Excel for
Android too. Btw, Python is available as a package in the Termux
Android app that I use when programming on my tablet:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en
Some people are working to get R on there too.
I don't know how intense your data analysis is, but I replaced
a Win7 ultrabook that had a dual-core i5 and 4 GBs of RAM with
an Android tablet that has a quad-core ARMv7 and 3 GBs of RAM
as my daily driver a couple years ago, without skipping a beat.
I built large mixed C++/D codebases on my ultrabook, now I do
that on my Android/ARM tablet, which has a slightly weaker
chip than my smartphone.
I would have gobbled up 4GB using Matlab 5 years
ago...Nowadays, I sometimes use a program called Stan. It does
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Often it takes 10 minutes to run
models on my home machine that's got a relatively new i7
processor on it. It's not unknown for the models to take hours
with bigger data sets or more complicated models. I don't even
like running the models at work because my work computer sucks
compared to my home computer.
The latest ARM-based iPad Pro is notorious for beating low to
mid-range Intel Macbooks on benchmarks. It is not difficult
to pick up smartphones with 6-8 GBs of RAM nowadays. Unless
you need monster machines for your data and aren't allowed to
crunch your data on online servers for security reasons, a
very niche case, you can very likely do it on a smartphone.
Doing everything on an AWS instance would be nice.
All the low-hanging fruit is being gobbled up by mobile, and most
of the heavy compute by cloud servers. That leaves a narrow
niche in between for beefy desktops, since most PCs sold are
laptops. Perhaps you are in that desktop niche, but I contend it
isn't very big.
You may be right that your particular workplace moves slowly
and they're not going mobile anytime soon. But this is such a
big shift that you have to wonder if many such slow-moving
workplaces will be able to compete with places that don't:
just ask all the taxi companies phoning in rides to their
drivers who got put out of business by Lyft, Uber, and their
smartphone-wielding hordes of drivers.
We certainly have big competitive issues, but they aren't
because our competitors are using Google Docs.
No, it happens when they streamline and automate their entire
workflow much more, to the point where they aren't using
antiquated document systems anymore:
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-messaging-and-verbs
I've never written a single document in the entire time I've
contributed to the D open source project. That's because we
replace that ancient document workflow with forums, email,
gitter, bugzilla, git, and github, some of which is also fairly
old tech, but not nearly so as typing up a bunch of documents or
spreadsheets.
Of course, the D OSS project isn't a business, but the point is
made in that linked post: most businesses are also about to
transition away from that doc workflow altogether, where they
simply replaced a bunch of printed documents and balance sheets
with digital versions of the _same_ documents over the last
couple decades. It's time for them to make the true digital
transition, or they will lose out to those who did and became
more efficient for it.
Lyft and Uber are merely two public examples of the leading edge
of this wave.
There will always be a few Windows cockroaches that survive
the mobile nuclear blast, but we're talking about the majority
who won't.
As for you particularly, I can't speak to your situation
without knowing more, but nobody's saying D should drop
Windows support. I started off this OT thread by saying that
investing more time in getting D somewhere close to the level
of C#/C++ support in Visual Studio or some other IDE is a
waste of time. I stand by that. If Rainer or someone else
does it anyway, that's up to them how they want to spend their
time.
Look at the growth of Python. Among the many drivers of that,
are people who use Numpy and its ecosystem (SciPy, Pandas,
etc.). The work that Ilya et al are doing on Mir is a fantastic
effort to provide similar functionality for D. More users using
Mir will help build out the ecosystem and hopefully get it to a
competitive place with Numpy one day. This requires more people
using D. If efforts by Rainer or someone else to make the
Windows experience better and leads to more D users and more
Mir users, then I consider a positive. I don't consider it a
waste of time.
Do those Python/Numpy users have the level of VS or other Windows
IDE support that D currently doesn't? Either way, math modeling
is such a small niche that I'm not sure it makes a difference,
though I'm glad Ilya and others are pushing D in that direction
on all OS's.
