The PC era is not over — yet

No more PCs! We’ll do it all with smartphones and tablets! That’s what even InfoWorld’s pundits seem to be saying lately. Not so fast — I have my cranky pants on this morning and the rush to declare a “paradigm” (I hate that word) shift to a post-PC world ruled by mobile devices and cloud services has me chewing my moustache.

Here are just three of the many reasons to take the postulations of my colleague Eric Knorr (don’t take it personally, boss) and others with many a grain of salt:

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Privacy: Do you really expect Google to tell some snoopy law-enforcement type that it can’t see the stash of email and documents you keep in the cloud because you no longer have local storage? Not to mention the myriads of hackers and crackers out there.

Vendor lock-in: How many of us complained bitterly that we were chained to Microsoft (or Oracle or SAP, in the case of business computing)? Now products like Google’s Chromebook would throw us all into the arms of Google for every little thing.

Spectrum shortage: For years, there was a shortage of bandwidth in the wired world. We’ve largely overcome this hurdle, but think back to those days and the problem. Now that we’re all moving to wireless devices, we’re running out of spectrum.

Uncle Sam wants your data In the first six months of 2010, law-enforcement types in the United States made 4,287 requests for information about users or to have certain data removed from the Web. How do I know this? Google posted a transparency report that shows what governments around the world have been asking (or maybe telling) it to do.

The New York Times pointed out earlier this week: “As Internet services — allowing people to store e-mails, photographs, spreadsheets and an untold number of private documents — have surged in popularity, they have become tempting targets for law enforcement.” The more data you have stored in someone else’s hands, the more you run the risk of a third party getting to see it — legitimately or otherwise.

I realize that the much-heralded Google Chromebook is closer to a concept than a finished product at this point, but more than any other, it encapsulates the technological wishful thinking (some of it rooted in dislike for Microsoft) that has become so fashionable. Yeah, I see the cool factor, but it has very limited local storage and no easy way to run local productivity apps. This one device exemplifies all three of the serious problems with the new paradigm.

Because you can’t run any productivity apps locally, you’ll probably be using Google Docs. In fact, with the exception of a few competitors, like Zoho and Microsoft Office 365, that’s about it for choices. You won’t have good options that enable you to create rich documents. And once you’ve created those docs, not to mention a load of your emails if you use Gmail, all of your stuff is sitting on a Google server, just waiting for the feds to come looking.

If you use Web mail today, you have that issue as well, but at least your other documents are securely stored on your company’s servers or on your own local drives. And when you use a real PC or netbook, you can access those emails and documents wherever and whenever you need. That’s not the case when you can’t get online because you’re on an airplane or there simply isn’t enough bandwidth in the neighborhood to work.

All of us who have struggled with AT&T’s network over the last couple of years should know just how frustrating that can be. But at least when AT&T lets me down, I still have access to all of my stuff. That wouldn’t be the case if I were chained to a Chromebook or similar paradigm-shifting (yuck) device.

The spectrum shortage is serious More than a year ago, I warned that a shortage of spectrum was becoming a serious issue that few publications had noticed. Well, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has taken heed, and last week at CES he said: “The coming spectrum crunch threatens American leadership in mobile and the benefits it can deliver to our economy and our lives.”

To be fair, Genachowski has been sounding the alarm about this issue for some time. “I believe that that the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis,” he said at the CTIA conference in October 2009. He predicted that total wireless consumption could grow from 6 petabytes a month in to 400 petabytes by 2013. (A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes.)

“What happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?” Genachowski asked.

Great questions — but we’re still waiting for definitive answers. As part of its national broadband plan, the FCC last year proposed allowing broadcast TV stations to voluntarily sell some of their spectrum for mobile broadband purposes. In November, the Commerce Department announced a plan to allocate 115MHz of spectrum to wireless broadband in the next five years.

There’s already some of the usual free-market Neanderthal opposition to anything the FCC and other parts of the government do to improve the communications environment, so we’ll see what happens. Even in the best case, it will be years before that capacity is in place. But in the meantime, the shortage of spectrum is very real, and if you depend on wireless communications for day-to-day computing needs, you’re going to be terribly frustrated.

That said, I certainly know we’re moving away from a PC-centric world. Motorola’s Atrix unveiled at the just-concluded CES, the iPad, and other Android devices ameliorate some of these issues. But the shift away from the PC is not going to happen overnight, and it’ll be much more difficult than the digerati would have us believe.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “The PC era is not over — yet,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com.