In our always on-going awareness of business technology necessary to implement appropriate training curriculum to upgrade human capital to facilitate business activity, we have paid close attention to the advent of the slate format computing platform (“tablet”) and looked for ways it can replace existing technology. The bottom line so far, is slates are great for media consumption, but terrible for most business related clerical work.
Slates work nicely to allow simple things, such as collecting data for appraising homes (picture, with very limited data entry, mostly automated by GPS), or closing a sale, or delivering product (think UPS tablet used to collect customer’s signature). They are sorely lacking, however, at efficiently typing letters, coding infrastructure in web sites, developing financial spreadsheets for advanced analysis or reporting, mail merges, and other routine, critical, business processes.
As such, our take so far, is that slates (tablets) are a good supplemental tool that is helpful in the field and replaced by a “real computer” as soon as possible when returning to home or office. One possible advance that would move this technology forward is the concept of the dual purpose slate, which runs (for instance, as Canonical has had for a few years now) Android when in the field, and can be dropped into a dock connected to a conventional keyboard, mouse, and 24″ flat screen and switches to Linux. It could as well be a Microsoft slate such as a Surface Pro with the same capabilities — to use Windows 8 in the field and dock at the office to switch to a Windows OS with a hierarchical menu system (instead of the cell phone-like pictures) and a business efficient keyboard, mouse, and so forth.
I think that the PC will change, but not die, because its work cannot be done as well by anything else. I also feel that it is entirely reasonable that the “PC” in the future could drop easily into my shirt pocket or cling to my wrist and include a touch screen for my work, communications, and wireless enjoyment while I am away from my office, then transition back to a fully powered desktop workstation monster when I drop it into a dock — possibly any dock, even at a customer’s location to do some contract work or a friend’s house to start the party with some of my fav tunes. And in business, that is what we refer to as job security.
For your enjoyment, here is a YouTube video of Dell’s Jeff Clarke explaining his take on the matter:
Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and head of Dell’s PC business, walked onto the stage at the Dell Annual Analyst Conference this morning in Austin to the tune of Spamalot’s “I Am Not Dead Yet” and gave some of his top 10 reasons the PC is, in fact, dead:
10. Just 315 million PCs were sold last year.
9. In this room, only nine out of 10 people have a PC. The tenth person probably has three.
8. 68 percent of consumers use PCs to shop on Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is not much to crow about.
7. PCs are used by only 100 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
6. Excel and smartphones are a match made in heaven.
5. Of the 1.2 billion ATMs around the world, just 1.2 billion of them are using a PC.
4. Nearly all consumers who own a personal computer use it at least once a day. Which is more often than they bathe.
3. Scientists, government employees, engineers, architects, and the entire film industry gave up PCs in favor of “story time.”
2. Since the “post-PC era” began in 1999, only 3.58 billion PCs have been sold. Pundits may have meant the “post-typewriter era.”
1. Mainframes and minicomputers are totally making a comeback.
The article which lead us to this is at http://techpageone.dell.com/technology/top-10-reasons-the-pc-is-dead