The latest obituary comes from Apple, which is now proclaiming a post-PC world (which by definition will also be a post-Mac world). The BBC quotes Apple’s Steve Jobs as saying “About 10 years ago we had one of our most important insights. That was that the PC was going to become the hub of your digital life.”
But now, mobile devices have overturned that model. Their built-in communications means they are always connected. “… they can talk to the cloud whenever they want. Now if I get something on my iPhone, it sends to the cloud immediately. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”
As a company talking up the importance of tablets and smartphones, and their own cloud-based service, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But it is the direction that so many device manufacturers, service and application providers, and equipment vendors see the world moving: into the cloud.
By separating processing power and storage capacity from the physical constraints of a PC, and shifting those qualities into the cloud, I think we are taking a big step towards realizing the true potential of the ICT infrastructure we have been building around the planet.
My colleague Ola Hubertsson put it well in an earlier blog theme here at Thinking Ahead, there are three main forces shaping and transforming our world into a Networked Society: mobility, broadband and the cloud. The constant and accelerating emergence of new devices and services that make the best use of those three forces means that even if the PC isn’t quite dead yet, it is starting to look like a future candidate for retirement.
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