Get set for a Windows PC comeback

You’ve seen the numbers: IDC predicts a year-over-year decrease in PC sales of nearly 4 percent for the United States and Europe this year. And that number includes Macs, which as a segment increased 21.5 percent in Q3 2011 over Q3 2010. Meanwhile, tablet sales are booming.

OMG, it’s the end of the Windows PC!

[ Download the InfoWorld Windows 8 Deep Dive report for everything you need to know about the forthcoming Microsoft Windows 8 OS. | InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman wishes the Ultrabook label would guarantee a minimum technology level in Windows laptops. ]

Enough already! The Mac share of the PC market may be growing, led by the rousing success of the MacBook Air, but it’s still less than 13 percent. And 20 million tablets may have sold worldwide in the first half of the year, but that’s still a far cry from the 100 million or so Windows PCs that shipped. More to the point, since when did the people who bought those tablets junk their PCs? What they really want is an integrated experience across their PCs, smartphones, and tablets.

And with Windows 8, Microsoft finally seems to have gotten that. Windows 8’s Metro interface may seem tacked on at first, but it’s great for tablets and, of course, originated on Windows Phone 7. So once users get accustomed to it, they’ll enjoy a unified cross-device experience. Reportedly, porting Windows 7 apps to Metro will be a snap, and with a UI tool designed for HTML5 grid layouts, developers will easily be able to create apps that work on multiple screen sizes and orientations.

Then there’s Microsoft’s new Windows Live sync capabilities. If you log on with Windows Live ID from a Windows 8 PC, Windows 8 tablet, or Windows Phone 7 smartphone, all your configuration settings can travel with you among those devices, along with even your last state when you logged off — your open documents, apps, and so on. That should take synchronization across devices to a whole new level.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that Windows desktops themselves lack sex appeal. So who needs ’em? Laptop sales started outpacing desktop sales in 2008 — and the new Ultrabook design being promoted by Intel promises to give some consumer kick to Windows laptops.

Mainly the Ultrabook appeal will come from the form factor, which is intended to mimic that of the MacBook Air — in its first iteration was 0.78 inch at its thickest point — and a MacBook Air-like projected minimum battery life of five hours for Web use. But Intel is suggesting other common features for Ultrabooks, including near-instant-on capability and Intel’s Anti-Theft and Identity Protection technologies.

Keep in mind this is not a real spec: Intel isn’t Apple, so it can’t tell manufacturers what to do, and as far as I know the chipmaker has no plans for an Ultrabook certification program. But smart PC vendors are going to climb on the Ultrabook bandwagon. Apple has proven over and over again how important design is to user affinity and productivity. Not all laptop vendors will get the Ultrabook right, but even Intel’s rough outlines are a big step in the right direction.

Imagine if the Ultrabook became the new standard PC. Economies of scale would drive the price down for the lightest mobile Windows computing device with a real keyboard. And the Ultrabook’s sex appeal may become essential: If you believe that BYOT (bring your own technology) is on the horizon, where users purchase their own hardware and run a secure “business VM” on it, then you need a laptop people will actually want to buy.

I can’t say for sure what new HP CEO Meg Whitman was thinking when HP announced, contrary to freshly fired CEO Léo Apotheker’s intimations, that it was keeping its PC business. But I can speculate: In the United States, PC sales numbers have slipped for Dell, the only domestic Windows PC competitor HP has to worry about, and it’s still difficult to imagine broad swaths of business jettisoning decades of Windows applications and retraining everyone on Macs. If I were HP, I’d have designers working furiously on hot-looking Ultrabooks that will make Windows 8 sing.

At the beginning of this year, I was thrilled by all the new opportunities to extend the personal computing paradigm beyond the Windows PC — and I still am. But can a tablet or smartphone replace a device with a full keyboard? Can Google Apps replace Office, whether on PCs or Chromebooks? And are Ubuntu and LibreOffice on Linux PCs really viable business alternatives?

In fact, all of the above are great extensions to a primary laptop or desktop. And now that Microsoft has innovated more than I thought it could, a sleek Ultrabook running Windows 8 may well provide a new nucleus for business computing. The question is whether Microsoft, HP, and Dell can produce suffciently compelling products in time before Apple or other innovators take another big leap ahead.

This article, “Get set for a Windows PC comeback,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog, and for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.