The image of the snake eating its own tail arose this
morning as I read a story in
The Wall
Street Journal telling me that world-wide PC sales are slumping, down 8.3
percent from 3Q 2011 to 3Q 2012. This comes despite the fact that Microsoft is
just about to launch Windows 8, an operating system that attempts to fawn on
the modern customer who is supposed to love “touch technology,” thus the
ability to paw the screen instead of using a mouse.
WSJ recites among the reasons for what it calls a “tailspin”
competition from tablets and also bad economic times, including sluggish demand
in emerging economies. Both reasons are logical, but the bottom line is that the
personal computer is now a mature industry; its real market is not
personal but business use; and its
likely future will have less to do with the growth of
dollar output and more with growth in
employment. The real motive for buying a computer is hiring a new
employee. The image, however, of the leading edge of the computer industry, viewed
generically, thus tablets and smart phones included, “cannibalizing,” as the Journal
puts it, the PC market, does suggest that mythic Uroboros.
In
the sense that industries mature, great success always morphs into failure.
Success is measured by ever advancing annual growth rates, and in that sense
the PC market has been suffering for quite a while. The very effort to keep
growth growing by introducing ever more popular devices with the same
functionalities, causes dismay to the older parts of the industry even as
everyone celebrates Apple’s most recent triumphs. Trying to boost PC sales by
giving them features almost
necessary in
products barely bigger than a small calculator—thus screen-pawing powers—is a
form of desperation. It’s one thing to hold a phone in your left hand while
your right index finger messes with the screen; quite another to reach out to a
screen. From the keyboard to the screen? Sixteen inches, in my case. To the
mouse, half that distance. The “touch” solution goes against established habit.
But when you haven’t got any good ideas, and there is a deadline by which you
must become creative, grabbing popular features from a distinctly different device
is a great temptation. The same sort of desperation is present at Microsoft
too, to be sure. Windows 8? Already? Windows 7 is only 28 months old, issued in
July 2009. And we’re supposed to get excited?
