Always good to chat with you, Ken, for a reasonable and well-thought-out discussion...
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 10:32 PM, Ken Dibble <[email protected]> wrote: > > It's not the same as saying "desktops and keyboards are dead". Dead is what > Edison wax cylinder recordings and dial telephones (but not POTS phone > service) are. We still have a dial phone (circa 1960) in our telephone cubby. Best audio in the house! > Real keyboards that provide tactile feedback and allow touch typing are, and > always will be, irreplaceable for many types of data entry. Absolutely! I think this will continue to be true. Someone has to type in all that stuff on the Internet. Some of my clients do heads-down data entry. That's unlikely to be replaced with voice or thumb-boards. > Desktops are cheaper, faster, last longer and are easier to maintain than > laptops--and cannot be lost on the bus or dropped into toilets--and will > therefore be essential to the budgets of many organizations. Desktops are also really inconvenient to use on the bus or -- ew -- the toilet. People will choose the tradeoff that works for them; occasional inconvenience vs. portability. Well, I think the economics will change as the volume and rate of turnover changes. As demands for tablets and other portable thingies ramp up, costs will stabilize if not decrease. And power, CPU and memory capacities will continue to imrpove, of course. Take a look at the latest Chromebooks as a bridging technology: $249 laptop. All your stuff is in the (waves-hands) Google Cloud. For IT departments, it means support involves taking away the Chromebook you spilled this morning's latte on and giving you a new one, along with a stern warning. No local storage that needs virus checking. No need for local, only enterprise, backups. No "desktop" machine. You can sit down at anyone's Chromebook, login, and you have access to your stuff. It's the "Network Computer" done right, or at least, right-er. > They will never be "dead". They won't be universal, but they will be much > more common for business productivity purposes than, say, vinyl LPs are for > music reproduction purposes are. > And just as is now occurring with vinyl, which was almost killed off by CDs, > eventually a lot of people who mindlessly rushed to cell phones, pads and > laptops and expected those devices to provide a quality platform for > business purposes will return to the desktop because it is BETTER than those > crappy toys. And just has occurred with vinyl, it is a very, very small percentage of folks who return. The Gen-X'ers and Millenials I meet have a desktop at "work" but a portable device for their Digital LifeStyle (the lifestyle, not the registered trademark of the Sheridan Broadcasting System -- who?). They tweet, update their Facebook, follow their various interests, play, stream their music, etc. on smartphones with decent resolution and input capabilities (certainly not 90 wpm Qwerty!) I can sit at a desktop carrel and hook my tablet into a bluetooth keyboard and an external cabled display when I need to keyboard or need higher resolution. > Actually, I think it was something like 15 years ago when I first said, > "Computers, being general purpose devices, are irreducibly complex. If your > mind is not also complex, you are unsuited to use a computer, and would be > better off with several separate digital devices to play your music, watch > your TV, determine the time of day, send your email, and surf your > internet." > > But the diversification of increasingly specialized digital devices will not > kill off the general purpose desktop. And therefore the desktop computer and > tactile keyboard are not now, and never will be, dead. And any hardware > vendor who expects to make a living by serving the business world (as > opposed to the home market) and bets on the desktop and keyboard being dead > is going to lose her shirt. > As I said earlier in this thread, "dead" is hyperbole. But static, not growing, innovation on decline may all be true. Opportunities are cropping up to come out with new apps on these new devices. > And no decaf, ever. Might as well drink camomille tea. Big tea fan, myself. Coffee, stat, in the AM, but I taper off after that. Decaf after 4 PM or so. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/CACW6n4sGi=-dxpvevh38gvah_3u9wt1fo0hrbtvcy5j44+x...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
