The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds?
November 30th, 2011 | by jz | Published in Future of the Internet, Generativity | 32 Comments
From Technology Review:
The Personal Computer Is Dead
Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.
By Jonathan Zittrain
The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.
The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. I wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It.
For decades we’ve enjoyed a simple way for people to create software and share or sell it to others. People bought general-purpose computers—PCs, including those that say Mac. Those computers came with operating systems that took care of the basics. Anyone could write and run software for an operating system, and up popped an endless assortment of spreadsheets, word processors, instant messengers, Web browsers, e-mail, and games. That software ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous to the dangerous—and there was no referee except the user’s good taste and sense, with a little help from nearby nerds or antivirus software. (This worked so long as the antivirus software was not itself malware, a phenomenon that turned out to be distressingly common.)
Choosing an OS used to mean taking a bit of a plunge: since software was anchored to it, a choice of, say, Windows over Mac meant a long-term choice between different available software collections. Even if a software developer offered versions of its wares for each OS, switching from one OS to another typically meant having to buy that software all over again.
That was one reason we ended up with a single dominant OS for over two decades. People had Windows, which made software developers want to write for Windows, which made more people want to buy Windows, which made it even more appealing to software developers, and so on. In the 1990s, both the U.S. and European governments went after Microsoft in a legendary and yet, today, easily forgettable antitrust battle. Their main complaint? That Microsoft had put a thumb on the scale in competition between its own Internet Explorer browser and its primary competitor, Netscape Navigator. Microsoft did this by telling PC makers that they had to ensure that Internet Explorer was ready and waiting on the user’s Windows desktop when the user unpacked the computer and set it up, whether the PC makers wanted to or not. Netscape could still be prebundled with Windows, as far as Microsoft was concerned. Years of litigation and oceans of legal documents can thus be boiled down into an essential original sin: an OS maker had unduly favored its own applications.
When the iPhone came out in 2007, its design was far more restrictive. No outside code at all was allowed on the phone; all the software on it was Apple’s. What made this unremarkable—and unobjectionable—was that it was a phone, not a computer, and most competing phones were equally locked down. We counted on computers to be open platforms—hard to think of them any other way—and understood phones as appliances, more akin to radios, TVs, and coffee machines.
Then, in 2008, Apple announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Third-party developers would be welcome to write software for the phone, in just the way they’d done for years with Windows and Mac OS. With one epic exception: users could install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and then each individual app was to be vetted, at first under standards that could be inferred only through what made it through and what didn’t. For example, apps that emulated or even improved on Apple’s own apps weren’t allowed.
The original sin behind the Microsoft case was made much worse. The issue wasn’t whether it would be possible to buy an iPhone without Apple’s Safari browser. It was that no other browserwould be permitted—or, if permitted, it would be only through Apple’s ongoing sufferance. And every app sold for the iPhone would have 30 percent of its price (and later, that of its “in-app purchases”) go to Apple. Famously proprietary Microsoft never dared to extract a tax on every piece of software written by others for Windows—perhaps because, in the absence of consistent Internet access in the 1990s through which to manage purchases and licenses, there’d be no realistic way to make it happen.
Fast forward 15 years, and that’s just what Apple did with its iOS App Store.
In 2008, there were reasons to think that this situation wasn’t as worrisome as Microsoft’s behavior in the browser wars. First, Apple’s market share for mobile phones was nowhere near Microsoft’s dominance in PC operating systems. Second, if the completely locked-down iPhone of 2007 (and its many counterparts) was okay, how could it be wrong to have one that was partially open to outside developers? Third, while Apple rejected plenty of apps for any reason—some developers were fearful enough of the ax that they confessed to being afraid to speak ill of Apple on the record—in practice, there were tons of apps let through; hundreds of thousands, in fact. Finally, Apple’s restrictiveness had at least some good reason behind it independent of Apple’s desire for control: rising amounts of malware meant that the PC landscape was shifting from anarchy to chaos. The wrong keystroke or mouse click on a PC could compromise all its contents to a faraway virus writer. Apple was determined not to have that happen with the iPhone.
By late 2008, there was even more reason to relax: the ribbon was cut on Google’s Android Marketplace, creating competition for the iPhone with a model of third-party app development that was a little less paranoid. Developers still registered in order to offer software through the Marketplace, but once they registered, they could put software up immediately, without review by Google. There was still a 30 percent tax on sales, and line-crossing apps could be retroactively pulled from the Marketplace. But there was and is a big safety valve: developers can simply give or sell their wares directly to Android handset owners without using the Marketplace at all. If they didn’t like the Marketplace’s policies, it didn’t mean they had to forgo ever reaching Android users. Today, Android’s market share is substantially higher than the iPhone’s. (To be sure, that market share is inverted in the tablet space; currently 97 percent of tablet Web traffic is accounted for by iPads. But as new tablets are introduced all the time—the flavor of the month just switched to Kindle Fire, an Android-based device—one might look at the space and see what antitrust experts call a “contestable” market, which is the kind you want to have if you’re going to suffer market dominance by one product in the first place. The king can be pushed down the hill.)
With all of these beneficial developments and responses between 2007 and 2011, then, why should we be worried at all?
The most important reasons have to do with the snowballing replicability of the iPhone framework. The App Store model has boomeranged back to the PC. There’s now an App Store for the Mac to match that of the iPhone and iPad, and it carries the same battery of restrictions. Some restrictions, accepted as normal in the context of a mobile phone, seem more unfamiliar in the PC landscape.
For example, software for the Mac App Store is not permitted to make the Mac environment look different than it does out of the box. (Ironic for a company with a former motto importuning people to think different.) Developers can’t add an icon for their app to the desktop or the dock without user permission, an amazing echo of what landed Microsoft in such hot water. (Though with Microsoft, the problem was prohibiting the removal of the IE icon—Microsoft didn’t try to prevent the addition of other software icons, whether installed by the PC maker or the user.) Developers can’t duplicate functionality already on offer in the Store. They can’t license their work as Free Software, because those license terms conflict with Apple’s.
The content restrictions are unexplored territory. At the height of Windows’s market dominance, Microsoft had no role in determining what software would and wouldn’t run on its machines, much less whether the content inside that software was to be allowed to see the light of screen. Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore found his iPhone app rejected because it contained “content that ridicules public figures.” Fiore was well-known enough that the rejection raised eyebrows, and Apple later reversed its decision. But the fact that apps must routinely face approval masks how extraordinary the situation is: tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world. Why would we possibly want this to be how the world of ideas works, and why would we think that merely having competing tech companies—each of which is empowered to censor—solves the problem?
This is especially troubling as governments have come to realize that this framework makes their own censorship vastly easier: what used to be a Sisyphean struggle to stanch the distribution of books, tracts, and then websites is becoming a few takedown notices to a handful of digital gatekeepers. Suddenly, objectionable content can be made to disappear by pressuring a technology company in the middle. When Exodus International—”[m]obilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality”—released an app that, among other things, inveighed against homosexuality, opponents not only rated it poorly (one-star reviews were running two-to-one against five-star reviews) but also petitionedApple to remove the app. Apple did.
To be sure, the Mac App Store, unlike its iPhone and iPad counterpart, is not the only way to get software (and content) onto a Mac. You can, for now, still install software on a Mac without using the App Store. And even on the more locked-down iPhone and iPad, there’s always the browser: Apple may monitor apps’ content—and therefore be seen as taking responsibility for it—but no one seems to think that Apple should be in the business of restricting what websites Safari users can visit. Question to those who stand behind the anti-Exodus petition: would you also favor a petition demanding that Apple prevent iPhone and iPad users from getting to Exodus’s website on Safari? If not, what’s different, since Apple could trivially program Safari to implement such restrictions? Does it make sense that South Park episodes are downloadable through iTunes, but the South Park app containing the same content was banned from the App Store?
Given that outside apps can still run on a Mac and on Android, it’s worth asking what makes the Stores and Marketplaces so dominant—compelling enough that developers are willing to run the gauntlet of approval and take a 30 percent hit on revenue instead of simply selling their apps directly. The iPhone restricts outside code, but developers could still, in many cases, manage to offer functionality through a website accessible through the Safari browser. Few developers do, and there’s work to be done to ferret out what separates the rule from the exception. The Financial Times is one content provider that pulled its app from the [iOS] App Store to avoid sharing customer data and profits with Apple, but it doesn’t have much company.
The answer may lie in seemingly trivial places. Even one or two extra clicks can dissuade a user from consummating what he or she meant to do—a lesson emphasized in the Microsoft case, where the ready availability of IE on the desktop was seen as a signal advantage over users’ having to download and install Netscape. The default is all-powerful, a notion confirmed by the value of deals to designate what search engine a browser will use when first installed. Such deals provided 97 percent of Firefox-maker Mozilla’s revenue in 2010—$121 million. The safety valve of “off-road” apps seems less helpful when people are steered so effortlessly to Stores and Marketplaces for their apps.
Security is also a factor—consumers are willing to consign control over their code to OS vendors when they see so much malware out in the wild. There are a variety of approaches to dealing with the security problem, some of which include a phenomenon called sandboxing—running software in a protected environment. Sandboxing is soon to be required of Mac App Store apps. More information on sandboxing, and a discussion of its pros and cons, can be found here.
The fact is that today’s developers are writing code with the notion not just of consumer acceptance, but also vendor acceptance. If a coder has something cool to show off, she’ll want it in the Android Marketplace and the iOS App Store; neither is a substitute for the other. Both put the coder into a long-term relationship with the OS vendor. The user gets put in the same situation: if I switch from iPhone to Android, I can’t take my apps with me, and vice versa. And as content gets funneled through apps, it may mean I can’t take my content, either—or, if I can, it’s only because there’s yet another gatekeeper like Amazon running an app on more than one platform, aggregating content. The potentially suffocating relationship with Apple or Google or Microsoft is freed only by a new suitor like Amazon, which is structurally positioned to do the same thing.
A flowering of innovation and communication was ignited by the rise of the PC and the Web and their generative characteristics. Software was installed one machine at a time, a relationship among myriad software makers and users. Sites could appear anywhere on the Web, a relationship among myriad webmasters and surfers. Now activity is clumping around a handful of portals: two or three OS makers that are in a position to manage all apps (and content within them) in an ongoing way, and a diminishing set of cloud hosting providers like Amazon that can provide the denial-of-service resistant places to put up a website or blog.
Both software developers and users should demand more. Developers should look for ways to reach their users unimpeded, through still-open platforms, or through pressure on the terms imposed by the closed ones. And users should be ready to try “off-roading” with the platforms that still allow it—hewing to the original spirit of the PC, perhaps amplified by systems that let apps have a trial run on a device without being given the keys to the kingdom. If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.
November 30th, 2011 at 12:37 pm (#)
Just curious, have you ever tried Linux before?
When you restrict your analysis to walled-garden OS’s, even if the majority people still don’t use them on their PC (phones are not PCs), what do you think the end result is going to be?
November 30th, 2011 at 12:43 pm (#)
The nerds are mad. Just look at their reaction to Apple. They just HAD to jailbreak the device to “protect” us from no configuration needed computing. Every prediction they made was dire and wrong.
November 30th, 2011 at 12:52 pm (#)
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November 30th, 2011 at 1:00 pm (#)
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November 30th, 2011 at 1:02 pm (#)
“Microsoft never dared to extract a tax on every piece of software”
Microsoft did however extract a tax of sorts of of EVERY PC vendor requiring them to pay for Windows for every device they manufactured whether it shipped with Windows on it or not. Thereby trying to squeeze competing OSes on Intel x86 hardware out of the market for Desktop Computers. A Tax by any other name would be just as regressive.
November 30th, 2011 at 1:17 pm (#)
To answer your last point, the “why do the developers run that gauntlet?” bit, a lot of them make a lot more money on the various app stores than they do setting up their own web site and accepting PayPal. I think the walled gardens are illustrating that consumers spend a lot more money in walled gardens than outside them.
And heck, as a consumer myself, I’m comfortable not just having to send my credit card number to some guy with a web site and an order form. The “real internet” and the “walled garden” is the difference between shopping on Craigslist, and shopping on Amazon’s used goods market. The wild west of Craigslist may be a place where I can find a better deal and a freer market, but there’s a lot of noise to sift through to find the signal. Sometimes, that extra search cost isn’t worth it to me.
Isn’t this your Red PC vs Green PC thing all over again? Why is having an opportunity to choose between a walled garden and the wilderness supposed to make nerds angry? You proposed it as a compromise between the two, and it seems like we have it now.
November 30th, 2011 at 1:33 pm (#)
The nerds are fine because every smart nerd I know at least uses an Android phone because it still gives you some degree of freedom. The majority of simple minded sheep are happy to get locked in to something like Apple’s eco system.
I do not like Apple at all for what they do but I’m fine with selling apps for Android and iOS. It’s ok to get paid… even by sheep.
November 30th, 2011 at 1:35 pm (#)
Just one thing, Apple is not the only vendor in town. If some people choose to use Apple and their app service system that’s their prerogative. We still have Microsoft selling their stuff, Linux is widely available and its getting easier to install and run them on PCs. So any one who wants to get out the stranglehold of Apple or Microsoft can easily do so. I for one exclusively use Linux at home.
November 30th, 2011 at 1:43 pm (#)
The PC is not dead yet. Businesses will use PC’s. It may be diminished, but not dead.
November 30th, 2011 at 2:16 pm (#)
There are no angry nerds because they can choose to leave. They can get a Linux machine and have even more hacking fun than they did before.
November 30th, 2011 at 2:38 pm (#)
the premise of this article made me lol.
the pc is not dead.
and the nerds are not angry, because they are busy working on their pcs… creating other new technologies for people to worry about.
ingenuity will always be on the side of the masses. with the size of the global population where it is today, nothing short of mass-extinction can stop humanity’s forward momentum of inovation.
the painful times ahead will only increase the veracity of said ingenuity.
November 30th, 2011 at 3:11 pm (#)
I suspect that most of the nerds are still using open environments, and that the vast majority of people now flocking to tablets and smartphones and completely away from laptops and desktops were people for whom laptops and desktops were never really the best choice anyway. Again, this is merely speculation, but I would guess that the vast majority of PC users purchased them so they could correspond via e-mail and surf the Internet, and maybe write up the occasional document or spreadsheet. They probably would have gotten a tablet or smartphone right off the bat, execpt for those things didn’t even exist back then and so they had to make do with machines that were ridiculously overpowered with respect to their needs.
It’s kind of like everyone buying a KitchenAid stand mixer with a full complement of attachments when all most people ever do is beat eggs for omelettes, and then someone comes along and invents a hand-held eggbeater. It’s lighter, it’s more portable, it’s more power-efficient, it doesn’t require dedicated counter space, and it’s more intuitive for all of those people making omelettes. Most people are going to switch to the hand-held version, but those people who were also making dough and chopping salad and grinding meat and cranking out pasta are going to stick with their stand mixers. It’s not that the emergence of the hand-held version suddenly created a new group of users; there were two groups from the start and the hand-held version simply highlighted that difference.
I don’t think that nerds (and I count myself among them) are really going to get angry about a tool that isn’t useful to them. It’s when the tool that I love starts to become unavailable that I’d start getting mad. If companies actually stop producing PCs, that’s when you need to watch out!
November 30th, 2011 at 3:39 pm (#)
This article is spot on. People should always have the choice on any of their computing devices to stay within the walled gardens (if they really want to) or wander outside. These devices should not be locked down. Anyone should be able to provide an “app store” for any of these devices.
I run Linux on several of my own and my kids’ computers and the only real problem they have had with Linux is interfacing with a walled garden iPod. (Generic music players — no problems.)
At least (as the author acknowledges) the common PC operating systems aren’t locked down — yet!
November 30th, 2011 at 3:47 pm (#)
I am writing to applaud your article. It is well researched and well written. Many of the responses posted here are very short-sighted and fail to address the overall point of your article. Apple, Amazon and other software companies have demonstrated that huge profits are possible via this closed model of software distribution. There is no stopping this juggernaut because it is driven by profit and capitalism.
To argue there currently are other choices to Apple is to miss the point that we’re seeing an irreversible industry transition that is not better for consumers. Your comparisons to the Microsoft anti-trust cases makes this change appear very stark. What was once considered worthy of dividing Microsoft into two companies is now almost quaint compared to the rights the majority of buyers are giving away without a second thought.
I think the true nerds are angry but we’re seeing a redefinition and broadening of what defines a nerd to include less and less technical people. The notion of a geeky hacker is eclipsed by a hipster social platform user. For example, in the eyes of the non-technical is there really a difference between someone who knows how to expertly build web sites versus one who can expertly use them? The masses are becoming the nerds and they lack the knowledge to avoid the trap that they are dragging us all into. I find it difficult to be hopeful.
Sorry for the long comment. I just really appreciated your writing and after reading these responses I felt they all missed the mark.
November 30th, 2011 at 3:56 pm (#)
The nerds aren’t angry because we know the PC isn’t any more dead than it was the last dozen times Apple fanboys got confused about their place in the world.
This is the same breathless panic that floats to the surface every couple years. It’s also completely wrong: computing was purely service driven for its first 40 years.
Read a book, kid. You don’t know any more than late Windows and today, and that ain’t enough to talk about history or the future.
November 30th, 2011 at 3:57 pm (#)
Sadly, on a moderated site, no criticism will appear.
November 30th, 2011 at 4:53 pm (#)
Guess what, this page is powered by WordPress. (Spelled out right in the footer.)
So you’re using Linux and open source software right now–via a “PC” somewhere at MIT (18.168.0.26).
I have three Linux PCs at home and more Linux servers all over the US. Nothing comes close. I mostly use Debian, Fedora, CentOS. Most of the apps you use day-to-day, if they’re not using Linux for the frontend, they’re using Linux on the backend.
If you look at the data, the all these “mobile” devices are powered by the Internet. Guess what, the Internet is powered by Linux. So you can cry wolf all you want but Linux and the “PC” are here to stay. Even Android is Linux and all of Apple’s crippleware is UNIX, so good luck with that “PC is dead” hype.
PC != Windoze. But Windows isn’t really dead either–there are way too many applications out there that people need to survive, run their business, etc. Part of that is about the old peripherals and devices and machines real people just need to run their business, run their factory, run whatever they do. And I really doubt the Apple zombies want to rewrite two decades worth of dusty software. How hip would that be? So you’re stuck with Windows for a LONG TIME.
November 30th, 2011 at 6:02 pm (#)
Have you heard of JavaScript? Consumer apps will be in the web not on your hardware.
November 30th, 2011 at 6:06 pm (#)
This is a stupid article. :)
There are a lot of places wher you cant get enugh bandwith for the computing. You need resource at the local.
Maybe you will have a few ARM in the phones, fridges, … You will have tools for different jobs. Tablets, ebook readers for gaming and fast internet access, or for ebooks. But you will use your desktop or laptop for your work, or gaming.
Maybe you will not have a classic desktop, only a laptop, and for gaming a console.
There was a lot of vision, but can you remember the first net pc’s?
Cloud computing and virtualization will be popular at workplaces, but thin clients are made not for everything.
November 30th, 2011 at 6:09 pm (#)
[...] Fragt sich Jonathan Zittrain. A flowering of innovation and communication was ignited by the rise of the PC and the Web and [...]
November 30th, 2011 at 6:28 pm (#)
The PC is dead? Really? Have you tried doing email on an iPad? Copying & pasting is an exercise in frustration.
Where are the spreadsheet apps for the iPhone? How about creating a document with a mobile device?
How soon do you think Adobe will port Photoshop to the iPad? Don’t hold your breath.
Mobile devices will create new types of apps, but keyboard- and mouse-intensive applications are not practical on the tiny screen.
November 30th, 2011 at 6:54 pm (#)
PC = personal computer = desktop computer = tablet computer = mobile phone form factor computer; I believe what your really trying to say is operating system vendors are looking to control the distribution of software on their platforms. Well yes, yes they are but as you can tell just by looking at iphone from a technical perspective it makes little difference as those silly limitations can always be side stepped and removed. So “nerds” (a stupid term btw) could careless; it just another interesting challenge. Finally think about this; there are still an amazing amount of companies using mainframes and today brand new mainframes are still manufactured and sold. So if all these companies contracted mad cow disease and left the open IBM compatible PC market this would only create a hole that so many in the market would love, LOVE to fill; and I think that could be a very good thing.
November 30th, 2011 at 6:55 pm (#)
Microsoft is getting into this game, too. They’ve announced that Metro apps will only be available from Microsoft’s store, and while Windows 8 Intel PCs will run “legacy”, side-loaded applications, Windows 8 ARM tablets will only run Metro apps. My employer makes software, some of it runs on tablets. Currently our customers exclusively use Windows XP tablets, but the handwriting is on the wall – they will switch to Windows 8 tablets soon enough, and when they do they will want our products in Metro form. But our products are FDA certified medical devices – we CAN’T distribute them through Microsoft’s store, even if we were willing to give them a 30% cut of our gross sales. We may end up re-implementing everything as Web-based applications which they will then host on dedicated servers and access via Internet Explorer (you can bet Firefox and Chrome won’t be available for Windows 8 tablets).
November 30th, 2011 at 10:43 pm (#)
microsoft did indeed tax every piece of windows software. Visual Studio.
December 1st, 2011 at 2:07 am (#)
I wonder why you called this “The PC is dead”.
There is nothing in here to support your claim, because you really only wrote about today’s mobile device platforms.
December 1st, 2011 at 3:18 am (#)
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December 1st, 2011 at 5:14 am (#)
This is excellent stuff, and more readable than the book, which I found slightly overwrought. So please, write more!
It’s tempting not to be worried about the OS gatekeepers, since if you have physical access to the hardware you can run what you like (i.e., Linux). But that’s an illusion, since every useful app is now internet-facing.
We need to focus at all costs on keeping the browser separated from proprietary cloud services (Firefox being the last major bastion of freedom). Then we need some kind of cross-platform open standard for web apps. Finally, perhaps, we have to build some non-profit competition for the cloud monopoly providers.
And since all this is inevitably political, that means spreading the word about our impending status as supplicants and sheep rather than empowered citizens. It means getting people angry.
December 1st, 2011 at 5:17 am (#)
There are no unhappy nerds because you are wrong.
December 1st, 2011 at 1:12 pm (#)
For the folks here claiming this article is wrong or stupid (are you serious?) please cite some facts to backup your claims. Please read the news and be aware of the current direction of the industry. Perhaps the PC isn’t currently dead but I don’t think that is the point of this article. I think the point is that it is a forgone conclusion that it will be dead. Google “Apple on track to become leading global PC vendor”. Apple isn’t taking over the world but they are demonstrating that the most profitable way to sell hardware and software is through this closed, curated, and censored ecosystem. It is a fact that other companies seeking profit will follow a similar path to maximize returns for their investors. We are already seeing this happen even with the Android platform: Kindle Fire is closed, BN Nooks are closed, etc. Get over your angst about “Apple Fanboyism” or whatever and look at the facts. Even if the prediction doesn’t come true it is hardly unreasonable to expect these trends to continue down the path of more and more closed OS vendor controlled platforms.
December 1st, 2011 at 3:15 pm (#)
The PC, as a toy for nerds, has always been a niche product. The average computer user has always wanted an appliance – whether to write a document, or analyze some numbers, or do some research.
The PCs of yesteryear were not user friendly. As they became more user friendly, they became more commoditized, and , consequently, more of an appliance – can you think of any application that doesn’t use ctrl-C and ctrl-V for copy and paste? Aside from emacs and vi (which are hardly mainstream), I can’t. Twenty-five years ago, every application had its own commands for cutting and pasting.
Nerds aren’t angry because the computer is still what they remember it to be – a general purpose box. That the vast majority are moving away from the PC to their appliances doesn’t bother them in the least.
They will only get up in arms when PCs are no longer available. Perhaps, over the next decade or maybe longer, PC as we now know it may no longer exist. Perhaps the Personal will be removed from Personal Computer. Instead, everything will be centrally delivered from some cloud, our PCs being nothing more than dumb terminals. At this point, perhaps they will get angry.
December 8th, 2011 at 8:00 am (#)
[...] The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds? Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors ::: The Future of the Internet [...]
December 14th, 2011 at 9:44 am (#)
[...] bit about Apple’s content requirements for both the iOS and Mac App Stores in JZ’s The PC is Dead post. As JZ [...]