Prediction: The PC-free home by 2012

Is the day of the PC finally coming to and end?  Are the wars over what operating system or browser we use finally over?  If so then we should all hail a wonderful future… right!?

In the last few years we’ve seen a monumental shift in the way we interact with the internet, and in what we define as the devices we need to do so.

90+% of the activity we use PCs for, at least in the home, is internet-based, be it email, shopping or social networking.  Indeed as a power user the extra software I have on my PC that I use, Microsoft Visio and Publisher and Nero are the only ones that get used with any regularity, and in some cases that’s less than once a month.  The rest of the time I’m living in my browser, or, as in the case of Live Writer and Live Mail, I could be.

In the last month however there has been a monumental shift in computing technology with two products announced that could revolutionise computing in the home.  These are Apple’s iPad and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series.

These two devices are bringing together all the things we do for 90% of the time into, wait for it, consumer electronics devices.  Nothing short of the holy grail of home computing.

No installing or reinstalling, no maintenance, no worrying.  Just an OS on a chip that starts instantly, works without trouble and is virus and trojan resistant.  What household could resist such a future?

This is a future that’s about to take the world by surprise, as all of a sudden, everything we need to do around the home that we would ordinarily have a computer for is subsumed by these other handheld devices.  For proof you only have the look at the growing popularity of laptops over desktops in the home in the last few years.

So what does this mean for home computing, Microsoft and the internet?  So far as home computing is concerned this is a wonderful thing.  Having a tablet such as the iPad or Microsoft Courier, running a bespoke OS on a chip, that you can just pick up and use without ever having to worry about a virus or a reinstall, is more than compelling, it’s inevitable.  But there could be serious repercussions elsewhere.

But what about the software that people want to run at home?  Just look at web 2.0 apps such as Pixlr to see how advanced these are becoming.  With the launch of things like the online Microsoft Office apps, we’re seeing a new wave of web 2.0 applications that will quickly replace the need to have this software installed on your PC at all.  Furthermore, the move towards people using these new devices will drive innovation in Web 2.0 apps more quickly.

As for gaming, the PC has lost that battle some years back with the reinvention of the console.  Never again will the PC be the dominant ‘player’ in the gaming market.

Microsoft would be the first to suffer as sales of copies of Windows would plummet.  The OS would return, pretty much, to where it was in the mid 90’s with only businesses and enthusiasts owning a PC.  As a company they’d have to move with the times and reinvent themselves in a new consumer electronics market.

This wouldn’t be a problem for Microsoft as they’ve been doing this for years and, frankly, some of their own products are the ones that are driving this new technological wave forward.  The consequences for the internet could be much more serious.

The problem with devices on a chip, nice as the idea is in principle, is that it locks the abilities of those devices down firmly.  This means that upgrades only really appear when there’s new hardware, but this can have a knock-on effect with innovation.

Why should anybody innovate with new technologies on the internet when most of the devices out there won’t be able to use them?  New technologies come along all the time and there’s usually widespread adoption.  This however is because with PCs and Macs it’s a quick and simple task to update the support in software.  As an internet company though would you want to use the next big thing on the internet if you knew that the support for it in the hardware people own wouldn’t come along until you’d already been running it for a while?  Conversely, as a hardware company would you build in support for a new technology that nobody’s using yet, or that’s not on all devices because of the fractured nature of the new multi-OS ecosystem.

I believe, firmly in fact, that the entire home computing market is going to make a monumental shift towards these new consumer electronics devices in the next couple of years.  These new devices will save households money, do almost everything they need them to do, and do so in a worry-free and hassle-free way.  By 2012 it could be common to see households either completely without a PC or Mac, or where such a computer has been mothballed.

This is no bad thing in principle, but in practice we need to start thinking seriously about what the repercussions of this will be and if we’re happy for our current level of internet-based technology to remain static for the next decade.