What kids want for Christmas

[Grieve]

In the business market PC's are anything but in decline. Residential? perhaps but not by as much as people think. What the PC looks like is in our future. It will be a touchscreen laptopish like device. The tablet is no where close to having real functionality that replaces anything except browsing and remedial gaming.

There are some things that will always need a PC-like approach. For example...I'm a programmer, and I can't imagine doing it with anything less than a full sized keyboard and a big-assed screen (or even better, several screens).

But there is a HUGE area of business applications that absolutely do not need a full desktop or laptop. The future there is some form of mobile, whether it's a tablet or wearable computing. For example...the sales force (thousands of them) at our company use tablets most of the time now. Every week there some new announcement about a company moving a section of their workforce over to tablets.

The PC won't die completely, just as feature phones won't die, but their high growth years are done. PC shipments grew 0.9% this year, which is really a decline when you consider population growth, and I think that will turn into true decline soon. Meanwhile tablet sales are expected to grow from 56m in 2011 to 375m in 2016 (which is more than the number of PCs shipping this year), with 760m in use by then.