IBM declares post PC era has begun!

IBM CTO, Mark Dean stated in a Blog post last week that “PCs are going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records and CRT.”  That the age of the PC is over and the post PC era has begun.  These are big words from a credible source.  Since transitioning out of the PC hardware business, IBM has surpassed tech giant Microsoft in market capitalization.  So, is he correct?

Certainly the past three years have been a boon for mobile computing.  The tech industry has seen smart phones with dual 1Ghz processors, tablets sales dramatically cutting into laptop sales, cloud computing is on the rise, and network based browsers are growing faster than local browsers.   Thanks, to leading edge process nodes we can make more powerful electronics in smaller packages than ever before.

But in all this technology invention, there is one thing we have not been able to change or make smaller: the human users.  Netbooks taught us a lot about computing ergonomics.  First, there is an optimum keyboard size, that is intrinsically tied to the average size of a human hand.  Second, Netbooks also taught us about screen size and resolution: to usably view the internet you need more pixels than WVGA screens can provide.

What about the younger generation?  Sure, a person in their 30s might not find iphone screens as usable as PCs, but that is because they grew up with PC.  Kids, who grew up with iphones should have no problem making the paradigm shift, right?  Not quite.  A study done in 2009 compared typing on a blackberry, a laptop, and a full size keyboard.  The study found that people could type on the blackberry for 5 minutes before become fatigued and irritated.  On the laptop that number went to 30 minutes.  And on the full sized keyboard the time to fatigue was 3.5 hours.  Although not included in this study, I would speculate that hunt and peck touch screen input would fall short of the 5 minute blackberry mark.

What makes a compute platform a PC?  A full size monitor, a full size keyboard, and some type of CPU.  Although it is true that many of the processor and memory intensive activities of a PC are being moved to servers rather than rely on your local CPU, the things that make up a PC are not going away.  

source