osrin.net

As a long term employee of Microsoft you start to notice that several of the arguments involving the company are a little cyclic, they come and go but rarely seem to evolve all that much.

One bell that seems to toll every three of four years involves somebody declaring the death of the PC as we know it, an argument that is generally followed a few months later by a cry of “Long Live the PC”.

This document appeared in my inbox recently, it is written by one of our Principal Technology Specialists based in Brisbane, Geoff Clark. He does an excellent job of summarizing areas where we’re seeing innovation around the PC platform. The document discusses several ways in which the PC has been evolving over the last couple of years, and how we might expect it to evolve in the next couple.

The document itself was written just a little over a year ago, if it was updated today there would be room for additional topics such as the netbook, the role of the PC in robotics and surface computing. In an industry that occasionally feels a little stagnant it is useful to take a step back and look at what is really happening around us.

The document concludes;

Computing processing power, storage capacity and network bandwidth continue to grow at an amazing rate. Some of this growth is being used to drive server-based services, such as core business processes, either within the local data centre or delivered as “software as a service” over the internet. The impact of this growth is increasingly being felt at the edge of the network where we see increasingly productive user-focused computing, such as computer/human interaction and mentor-based functions. By moving these functions to the network edge in the form of the PC, the following advantages are realized:

- Your services can move closer to your customer
- Data entry accuracy is increased – and in many cases, data is entered by your customer
- The interaction with services and business processes become much more engaging and more easily understood

Whatever form factor the PC takes – from desktop, to laptop, tablet or “ultra mobile”, we will see it become even more powerful and in turn even more valued in the organisation of the future. It will be a personal mentor for guiding users through their day, helping them automatically deal with the routine, understand the relevant and enable them to magnify their effectiveness in the organisation.

Geoff has recently started blogging, if you’re interested in reading more of his thoughts you’ll find them here.