It seems to have become common widom that the age of desktops is past and
that the future now belongs to tablets and mobile devices. I wonder.
Today I visited two small businesses - here in a country town in an
undeveloped province in far away South Africa - and both were completely
reliant on their desktop computers for a whole range of their business
activities. Could they run their businesses on a tablet? (Well I suppose
they could, but would they for a moment want to?)
Before I retired to this corner of paradise, I worked for a major company
and was responsible (from a technical point of view) for the purchase of PCs
(desktops and notebooks). We bought over 2000 of those beasts every year.
Will tablets or mobiles ever replace a significant number of those devices?
In fact will they ever replace one of them? I doubt it. Of course, smaller
machines will find their niche alongside the PC throughout the major
organizations, but I can't see them replacing anything. (Well, OK I admit
that is a very strong statement! There are a few employees who only use
their computers for email and calendaring and perhaps they could get away
using a smart phone. But there are not many of them).
Yes, I can see that the casual home user may move to tablets. In fact many
of them will. But the more serious home user - who wants to use the computer
as a word processor or as a photograph store or to maintain a database of
the birds seen in the garden or .... We are stuck with our desktop machines.
And I wouldn't want it any other way, and am not scared that my desktop is
suddenly going to become redundant.
Come to think of it though, wouldn't it be nice to have a nice tablet to
take with me when I travel ...