I’ve been saying for a year or so now, that the PC Desktop market is going to dry up soon and everything will switch to a mobile computing platform of one kind or another.
That is why I have UMPCfan.com and TABLETfan.com which are other projects in my 100 in 1 Year master project.
You see, desktop computers are powerful, yes, but the average consumer isn’t interested in power computing anymore. They aren’t interested in bloated applications that require power computers. No, I think everyone is happy with Facebook and Farmville, ebook reading, and consuming text in the form of RSS feeds which once were dying off quickly. Now they are booming with the iPhone and soon iPad. There will always be a niche market for power computers, but for the most part, we’re seeing a switch to console games for gaming in a fixed location and mobile phones/devices for small, lightweight games.
I once had a computer that had the capability of having 3 multicore video cards in it. I played World of Warcraft as often as I could while in school. It was a fun way to decompress and socialize between studying and writing but you can do the same thing on a phone now, perhaps not with the same level of graphics, but it’s a possibility.
Gaming is easily done on a laptop and a “Free” wi-fi hotspot. Soon, cellular service will be able to move enough data to give mobile gaming a chance.
I’m now waiting for the iPad to hit the Apple Store and I’m learning to program for the Apple Platform. Now, what does all this have to do with the title?
Well, in 2009, according to NPD and Dean Takahasi of GamesBeat [via VentureBeat], U.S. Video game sales dropped nearly 9%. PC game sales specifically were down by 23 percent. Takahashi brings up my point about Facebook and social network games by addressing the fact that NPD didn’t account for that, nor MMORPG’s [Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games] which is an area of gaming that is keeping Activision alive with its Blizzard wing which programmed World of Warcraft. This in the wake of a market decline of 11 percent.
As a side note, during my MBA, I put together a presentation that discussed the social networking capabilities of MMO games in a way that allows a business to maximize efficiency if the game is designed with that functionality. For instance, we could program SimCity to pull data from UPS or FEDEX, or USPS and allow users to become shipping-business owners. Think of it is SimShipper or Shipping Magnate, that is what I referred to it as. They then can design their distribution system to maximize efficiency. With enough people doing enough actions, you can calculate the best place to insert a store or box for people to place packages in the real world AND get paid for it because people enjoy simulation games like SimCity, SimLife, and so on. Add the social element and competitive features, and you have people working hard to be number one and they provide valuable organic computing power. Something I mentioned in my presentation as being limited by the programmer who might design something like this as a command-line based simulation. Social gaming is currently only used for gathering personally identifiable information so you can sell the gamer on some other item. Sure, it is convertible to cash easily, but that is very simplistic use for such a powerful mechanism.
So, now we know that the gaming market on the desktop is slowing down, it might be a recession indicator that is just lagging behind. I’d have to do more research for that, but what I do know is that it fits well with the title of this post. We now are poised to “make a right turn” and that means dumping desktop computers for mobile computers which are just as powerful [or more powerful] than what is sitting under or on your desk right now. I know that my MacBook Pro is faster than my desktop in all areas, but one… the video card. I have faster hard drives in my mobile computer which weighs in at 3 lbs, than I do in my desktop which weighs an unbelievable 75lbs currently. Yep. 75 Pounds of metal and plastic. My Mac Mini has faster ram, a faster hard drive, and weighs in at around the same… 3 lbs. It even drives two monitors without having any extra cards installed, unlike my PC desktop. Things have gotten very small, very fast, and now we’re moving away completely. The Desktop is Dead.
I said back in December that the desktop is dead. We’re consuming in a lighter manner. The iPad for instance is going to be a hit, and its nothing more than a dumb terminal where information is fed to a fixed interface. Sure, you can install applications that allow for consumption in one way or another, but it really is just a device to interface with the raw data in a pretty container. I’m not complaining, I love the idea. That iPad, and the brethren is spawns, will allow me to watch a movie, surf the web, add to this blog or the many others that I manage and write for [again, shameless plug, I'm putting together 100 websites with products/services in 1 year], and do anything else I want short of playing a game that requires billions of voxels being rendered per second. I think the iPad/iPhone could do it, but it would drain the battery fast. I’m just barely joking.
I read this morning that a Google chief by the name of John Herlihy said that smart phones will be the new desktop. That isn’t hard to believe, Japan does more computing on their mobiles than Americans do by a longshot, they have faster bandwidth, and easier adoption of technology. Imagine is the US gets that fever. Then we have China, India and South America all getting into the spirit of things. Herlihy suggests that desktops will be “irrelevant” in three years. I find that a bit hyperbolic. It will always be a multi-billion dollar industry. It may be irrelevant to Google in terms of gaming, or power computing by consumers, but it won’t be to Google itself. Ask one of the engineers at Google. They’ll tell you that Desktop Computers are here to stay. But for the non-engineer… they are dead.
So, where are we headed other than to a mobile world? Into the Cloud. I’m not a fan of this new term for the Internet. People think that because it is called Cloud Computing, it is different than the Internet. It isn’t. Data is just as centralized. Doing things “in the cloud” means it is stored on an internet enabled device or service, like Google Gmail, or storing your backup on Carbonite instead of just your External USB drive. I have close to 600 blank CD’s and DVD’s sitting here that were, at one time, used for backups. Now I use a Time Machine to back everything up, as well as mirror storage drives just in case one fails. A cloud of sorts, in my office. But I have issues with this Cloud Computing concept. If it is stored somewhere else; I don’t have control of it. Sure, YOU say I do, but we know from the Microsoft/Danger fiasco of last year… if you don’t have it, someone else can lose it for you. I understand the benefits, but I think we’ll come to a point where trust issues will hinder the adoption of cloud computing as a marketing term. The adoption of IPv6 will allow a person to access any device they own via a secure connection and they’ll be able to control their own data through micro-clouds. I’ll call them Snowballs, just because I can, just like Cloud Computing is a cutesy marketing term for Internet. I’m surprised someone hasn’t trademarked the term. Oh wait… someone has trademarked the term “Cloud Computing”.
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