When Farhad Manjoo wrote his piece the other day at Slate about the diminishing landscape of the desktop computer I was tempted to chip in on the conversation. However it wasn’t until I read Mark “Rizzn” Hopkin’s post at SiliconANGLE this morning that thought turned into action.

You see the thing is that both of them have it right and yet, both of them have it so wrong; but before we continue we need to clarify one thing. The term PC doesn’t mean any one single form factor of a computing interface but rather the original term means nothing more than a device used for personal computing. In this aspect Steven Ballmer was right when he said at the recent D8 conference that the iPad was just another form factor of the larger concept of the PC.

He might have gotten a lot of flack over that statement but when you remove platform ideologies out of the discussion Ballmer was right. The fact is that the term PC, or personal computing, was co-opted as a way to market the early desktop computers. Now-a-days though, any device you use; regardless of the companies involved, albeit a tablet, or a smartphone, a laptop, or even the desktop is a PC in the the truest sense of the word.

Looking at the future through today

The point that Farhad was trying to make I believe is that because of the sale numbers for the desktop PC is declining and being taken over by tablets and laptops we should consider the days of the desktop numbered.

Sales data bear out this trend: The desktop is dying. In 2008, desktops were tied with laptops in the market—about 45 percent of the PCs that American consumers purchased for personal use were desktops, about 45 percent were laptops, and the rest were netbooks and other mini computers, according to data from the market-research companyForrester. Last year, sales of laptops eclipsed sales of desktops for the first time. According to Forrester’s projections, the decline in desktop PC sales will continue unabated over the next five years.

On the surface the numbers from Forrester that Farhad uses as the basis for his post sure make things look dire for the desktop, and it should be noted that these numbers came out before the success of the iPad. Its success alone will definitely increase those numbers of non-desktop PCs being sold.

Here’s the thing – I’m not the least bit surprised that the number of desktop PCs being sold has decreased. In fact I would have been more surprised if they hadn’t, or if they don’t continue to drop. So in this aspect, yes, the desktop might actually be disappearing but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be replaced with a new type of home computer.

Mark on the other hand is a strong believer in the longevity of the desktop and doesn’t see things like laptops or tablets killing it off.

I can’t tell you how they’ve arrived at this prediction of the future, but I can tell you one thing – so long as this world relies on keyboards and mice as the most efficient ways of managing productivity tools on a computer, there is absolutely no way you can achieve any sort of real takeover in marketshare from desktop PCs to tablets.

While I see, and understand his point, I am not in agreement that the desktop as we know it is here for the long haul.

Once again we need to clarify some terminology to see why both of these smart folks are wrong. Almost from day one desktop computers have been looked upon with two perspectives: the home and the office/workplace. The home desktop was always the central computer which could be used by everyone in the home. Then as things like laptops, tablets, and even to a lesser degree – smartphones, gained in power and became more affordable the desktop took on the role of a home server.

As people began to center their activity, both for entertainment and in a growing number of case working at home, around a home network. A network that is accessible both through the Web and their own internal network. It’s not that the desktop is being killed off it more of the fact that it is morphing into some thing different, something better, and maybe even something more powerful.

Gates’ disappearing desktop

One of the things that WinExtra writer Paul O’Flaherty and I talk about on the WinExtra on Windows podcasts is this idea that the desktop as we know it will disappear in the not too distance future. It’s not the idea that a home computer is going to disappear into a great big void, but rather that as our technology improves that desktop or home computer will become distributed through out our homes.

Even today things like Windows Home Server, or the kind that you put together yourself, are becoming more popular. With things like wireless mice and keyboards; and even the beginnings of wireless speakers, being able to distribute our home computer throughout the home is becoming more and more practical.

However a true distributed home server or home computer is still a little way off, but once we have true 1 gigabyte wireless, even if only internally, and we can remove the wires still connecting things like our monitors, then we will start to really see innovation within the home. At this point we will actually be able to have what Bill Gates termed as the disappearing desktop that will power our digital homes.

One of the hints of what the true potential of something like this would be comes from the upcoming availability of Microsoft’s Kinect, previously known as Project Natal. At this point much of the attention around Kinect has to do with the Xbox and gaming but once you step back and consider Kinect and it becoming an integral part of Windows 7 (or the future versions of Windows) a whole new home computing landscape suddenly opens up.

After all who says that a painting on the wall always has to look or behave a painting when with a simple Star Trek like command of “Computer – living room monitor – on”, or even just the simple swipe in the air in front of the painting replaces the static painting with a usable wall monitor. A monitor that can be used for multitude of purposes, or even multiple paintings can transform into multi-purpose monitors.

As wireless becomes faster and more robust who says that the hard drives have to reside in the same box or that the power supply – assuming that it isn’t replaced by being connected right into the home power supply – or has to be connected to the same controller as the video.

But this can also be taken one step further in that it is quite possible that at some point when you buy a new home, or even move into a new apartment, that your next home computer will already be a part of your home – built into it – and ready to go because you’ve moved all your data via the Web to its new home.

I fully believe that we will really start to see this aspect of a morphing home computer within the next five to ten years. While everyone is being distracted by the shiny future that broadband providers and software companies are trying to con us with there is a marketplace developing – largely ignored – that could totally redefine what we consider a home computer or home network to be.

Much of the talk about the demise of the desktop computer is centered around the mugs game of us all realizing how great living on the cloud is – even if it a cloud we are only renting. The problem with this sales pitch is that it suffers from one major flaw – broadband providers. As much as everyone would love the consumer to toss caution to the wind, along with their desktop anchor to the real world, and hop on the nearest cloud the reality is that the pot at the end of the rainbow is for the most part – empty.

That silver lining isn’t so silver

As good as the promise of great things that living in the cloud might be the reality is that it is so full of flaws as to be nothing more than a fun place to play for a little while but not worth taking up permanent residence. At the center of all these flaws is the very companies we need to make this dream come true – the broadband providers.

In this Mark is correct when he says in his post

The telcos and the cablecos are not focused on innovation. I watch very closely what comes out of both sets of industries, from inside sources as well as what’s publicly available. Whether they realize it or not, their focus appears to the rest of the world to be on how poorly they can treat their customers while providing them the slowest access speeds. Their only motivation to ever improve quality on either front is to prevent full scale violent attacks on their company headquarters.

These are the companies who continue to convince us that data and voice are two different things in our digital world and charge us accordingly. These are the companies that have proved over and over that they will whatever they can to provide the least for the most cost to the consumer.

As long as the broadband companies control the access points to the detriment of the consumer it doesn’t how great the cloud being offered us is. It is no surprise to me that at the same time that things like video over the web, gaming over the web, telephony over the web, are all being touted as the future all of us should be grasping that the broadband providers start talking caps and other types of limits.

After all, these great things have to be downloaded in one fashion or another, regardless of using terms like streaming you are still downloading and it all counts against those caps and limits.

The keys to a true distributed computing future are being held by the very companies who have no incentive to bring us the future.

So as much as people like Farhad Manjoo might like to have us believe that our future is just around the corner and that there is no more reason for us to need things like the desktop the fact is that kind of future is farther off that he thinks. We will see our home computers transform long before that idyllic cloud future and at the very heart of it will be the desktop computer, even though it will no longer look or even behave the same.

The desktop isn’t going anyway – it’s just growing up and becoming something better.

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