The death of the PC: Invented by Apple, accelerated by Microsoft

We told you so: The world is entering a post-PC era in which new types of devices are replacing the traditional PC. Many people argued that the global love affair with the iPad and with smartphones like the iPhone and the Galaxy S III was an intoxicated dalliance that would run its course. Others — such as myself and InfoWorld’s Bill Snyder and Woody Leonhard — countered that something different is going on. Known by the ungainly post-PC (coined by ex-Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie) moniker, it’s a shift to much more personal, mobile, and freer computing.

We’ve seen a decline in PC sales for several years now, and both Dell and Hewlett-Packard struggle to figure out a new business plan as a result. But many people — particularly those in enterprise IT, who tend to live in a Microsoft reality-distortion field — have actively blinded themselves to the shift. But new sales numbers from IDC will surely open their eyes: PC sales shrunk by 14 percent in the last quarter, the largest drop ever, and the latest in a four-year series of sales declines. Even if you add Windows 8 tablets and convertibles to IDC’s definition of a PC, the drop is still huge at 12 percent. And Asymco’s Horace Dediu calculates that Windows PC sales dropped 16 percent (he factored out Mac sales). This is the “oh crap” moment.

[ InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman explains why iPad apps can’t replace your desktop software — yet. | Subscribe to InfoWorld’s Consumerization of IT newsletter today. ]

Apple created the conditions for the post-PC shift with its six-year-old Phone and three-year-old iPad, but Microsoft has inadvertently hastened the transition with its self-inflicted wound of Windows 8.

Apple’s plan to kill the PC to change the game When Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPad three years ago, he predicted that tablets like the iPad would displace PCs for most users, and PCs would become the equivalent of the 1990s workstation: a specialized device used by a small percentage of workers for extreme computing, whether that mean computational capability or tied to needs for very large displays, specialty peripherals, or input mechanisms. He was right, and the PC industry should have listened.

It’s no secret that Apple intended to transition the world from PCs to iPads. Jobs himself described how the iPad’s iOS and the Mac’s OS X would build off each other until they ultimately merged into something that wasn’t just a more modern PC. It made a lot of sense for Apple to pursue this strategy; though the Mac regained much of its lost market share under Jobs’ second stewardship of Apple, the world remained dominated by Windows, and beating the PC paradigm with an arguably better PC operating system wasn’t likely to change that balance significantly. Apple needed a different playing field, so it created one — a big bet fueled by Apple’s iTunes success.

I fully believe Apple saw this transition taking five to 10 years — certainly, the pace of cross-pollination between iOS and OS X suggests that.

Microsoft’s bungling created a PC no one wanted Then Microsoft sped up the process by being stupid, making the Windows PC undesirable just as the post-PC alternatives began surging in popularity. As a result, mobile sales (iOS and Android) are booming — tablets will outsell PCs this year. Apple’s Macs may be caught in the overall PC downdraft as well, though at half the pace, according to IDC, which says U.S. Mac sales last quarter declined 7.5 percent versus a 12.7 percent U.S. decline for PCs overall. Gartner estimates a 7.4 percent increase in U.S. Mac sales, though — the two research firms are often out of sync on Mac sales estimates, so we’ll find out on April 23 when Apple reports hard sales numbers.

Microsoft had been trying to create a tablet market for more than a decade before the iPad arrived, but its pen versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were awkward to use, and the hardware was clunky. It had no sense of how to treat a touchscreen device, so it stuck a touchscreen on a flat laptop running the same old Windows.

When the iPad came along and showed that you needed to think different to get different, Microsoft panicked. It put its Office chief, Steve Sinofksy, in charge of the new Windows, later to be called Windows 8, and he led the creation of a new Windows user interface code-named Metro based on the Windows Phone UI that really did adopt a radically different approach to touch computing.

That made sense, but Microsoft decided it couldn’t break from the past so dramatically, as Apple had done in iOS, though it was derived from OS X. So Microsoft married Windows 7 and Windows 8’s Metro UI into what my colleague J. Peter Bruzzese — a real Windows aficionado — labeled “Windows Frankenstein.”

Windows 8’s early promise went unfulfilled The decision to bring the past along with the future wasn’t itself stupid. When I first saw the plans for Windows 8, I thought that a successful melding could really take on the iPad, as it would help ease the shift for existing Windows users — all 1 billion of them. But execution is everything, and Windows 8 is a really bad mix of Windows 7 and Metro, requiring way too much work and mental adjustments. Everyone I know who’s tried it hates it. The extremely poor sales — worse than the bad Vista — show most people feel the same way.

Microsoft’s stupidity extends beyond the Windows 8 execution, of course. Nearly every reviewer of the preview versions of Windows 8 hated the horrible mixing of Windows 7 and Metro, and for a year websites and blogs sounded the alarm. Microsoft ignored them all and delivered an essentially unchanged version.

As always, it cited user research to claim it knew better than the reviewers as to what people wanted. Microsoft is clearly horrible at doing user research, since it makes radical changes in its UIs every few years, citing that same research process. The truth is, if Microsoft’s user research were valid, it wouldn’t come to radically different conclusions every few years. Instead, Windows would evolve slowly, subtly but smartly modernizing along the way, as OS X has for a decade.

Microsoft suffers from believing its own fiction. When you talk to Microsofties, you can tell they live in a parallel universe apart from the rest of us. This is why Microsoft can ship Windows Phone without support for its own Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) policies, which it licensed to Apple and made iOS the corporate standard. This is why Microsoft can ship Windows RT without support for POP email or EAS. It simply doesn’t see what everyone else does, much as Research in Motion did to the BlackBerry’s peril and Nokia to its own peril.

I hear from the rest of the tech community that Microsoft is not only living in a delusion, but in separate delusions, with different arms of the company — Server & Tools, Windows, Mobile, and Office — having almost nothing to do with each other. There’s little synergy in product direction.

The result of this stupidity and dysfunction at Microsoft was the double whammy of Windows 8 and Windows Phone, both inferior products delivered at a time when Microsoft couldn’t afford to be inferior. Not only had the iPhone become the new corporate standard smartphone, the iPad had become the standard tablet for both users and businesses. Mac sales weren’t declining along with PC sales, in effect growing the Mac share — so much so that Gartner now says IT will accept Macs as a corporate standard alongside Windows PCs next year.

What it means to be post-PC But post-PC isn’t about Macs replacing PCs or even gaining equal status. It’s about computing where users take charge. iPads and smartphones are even more personal than personal computers. The reason the bring-your-own-device movement occurred with the iPhone and the iPad is not just because they are amazingly useful away from your desk. It’s because they give you the opportunity to be truly your own.

In the 1980s, PCs were that way, but over three decades, IT has neutered the PC into a soulless workstation in the name of security and standardization. A PC is just a piece of office equipment, while an iPad, iPhone, or Android equivalent is a personal device — your device, with the apps you prefer, the entertainment you want, and the communications channels you like. As professionals’ work is no longer bounded by regular hours and a static office location, that coexistence of personal and business on a computing device simply makes sense. Post-PC devices are perfectly aligned to a world where work and home are intermixed.

Yes, there are attempts to create separate containers on mobile devices to impose that IT mentality; desktop virtualization is one technique that’s gone nowhere, and there’s the notion of separate personas in BlackBerry OS 10 and in some Android devices. However, I suspect the strict separation of work and personal is a ship that has sailed.

Instead, businesses will adapt to a world where individuals carry their own computing engines — their smartphones and tablets — and hook in to networks, monitors, storage, input devices, and so on as needed. Our desks will have peripherals, not PCs. Standardization and security will move down to the information level, not the device level.

That vision is years away, of course. In the meantime, people will still use the PCs they have. But more and more companies will stop replacing them with new PCs and instead issue tablets instead to most workers — and eventually get out of the device-issuance business altogether, except for those workstation uses.

Steve Jobs’ vision is coming true, and Microsoft has made it so much easier to realize it.

This article, “The death of the PC: Invented by Apple, accelerated by Microsoft,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.