Death of the PC

The book I read to research this post was Death of the PC by Matt Baxter-Reynolds which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Apparently it was the case that every 10-15 years there was a game changing event in computing like Windows or the internet irreversibly changing things. That now in the ever more rapid rate of technological change of things is becoming every 7-10 years. Currently there is an invasion of digital devices mainly tablets and smartphones that threaten take away the Windows PC's dominance over the consumer computer industry. In business Windows and computers are still very much the dominant force. Microsoft makes most of its income from the Windows and Office products. They very much still dominate enterprise computing. It's too early to say what the next revolution in computing estimated to be around 2018-2020 will be but we are very much at a junction currently where digital devices are becoming very much lifestyle devices and part of peoples lives. Surprisingly the Chromebook which combines the easy boot up, low risk of virus infection and ability to work from resources like Google Docs on the internet. It has no hard drive and instead uses a cloud service with 100 GB free but has the advatage in common with computers of a keyboard. Currently buyers have been cautious about buying these but that may change as time goes on. One problem is buyers have to learn a new operating system. The dominance of digital devices started with Blackberry which were heavy duty smartphones with minature keyboards ideal for going on the web and answering e-mails. In the future social media is set even more closely with our lives. Android of course dominates the tablet and smartphones probably in part because it is open source and it is possible to buy tablets which are like unofficial products for around $50. Many of these are made in the far east. There are also devices officially endorsed by Google which pay them commision for the privilege.  This book looks at the major products and developments in the digital device industry and I must admit I learned a fair bit from it despite being quite tech savvy. I really enjoyed reading it. It's around 200-250 pages so is a reasonable length.