On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 15:25:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick
And people don't use PCs for such things? ;)
Sure, but they use them for a bunch of other stuff too. My point
was that mobile growth has been in the "such things" but barely
made a dent in the other stuff. So when you see 30% pc screen
time and 70% mobile, its not a 70% drop in actual time spent in
front of a PC. It's more a massive growth in time on mobile doing
mostly banal pointless crap.
I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in
PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad
came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have
switched to tablets and other mobile devices.
Yet PC sales are up this year, mobile is down, and tablet sales
have fallen for 3 years in a row.
More like when computers first started replacing typewriters,
I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :)
Im not laughing at the idea of mobile eating into desktop PC
share. What Im saying is that it hasnt done so as much as you
think. And just because there's been a trend for 5 or 6 years
doesnt mean it will continue so inevitably. I actually think most
people would prefer a separate desktop and mobile device, whether
that desktop is just the size of pack of cigarettes, or a big box
with 5 fans in it.
You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how
Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone
and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life,
while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the
mainstream market would care about such battery life as much as
their early adopters, but they were wrong.
But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the
head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got his
start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC and
this was his reaction:
"Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it
on a table in Olsen’s office.
'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that
it was so puny. Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor
engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.'
Clearly Olsen was wrong."
https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/
You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ what
people first use the new tool for, what matters is what it
_can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is now, as
top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to low-end PC
CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The x86/x64 PC's
days are numbered, just as it once killed off the minicomputer
decades ago.
Yes you can bring up examples of people who made mistakes
predicting the future but that works both ways. You're just as
guilty of seeing a two points and drawing a straight line though
them.
