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Tablet Shipments Forecast to Top Total PC Shipments in the Fourth Quarter of 2013 and Annually by 2015, According to IDC (IDC press release, 9/11/2013)

It’s the story that would not die! It’s the end of the PC era! It’s the end of Microsoft (which, oblivious, continues to increase revenue at comfortable operating margins, year after year after year)!

It’s …

Not what most industry commentators keep saying, over and over again. What it is:

Two facts:

  1. Television shipments are in decline.
  2. Tablet shipments aren’t just increasing, but ten or so tablets are sold for every television.

Conclusion: The advent of tablet devices has taken us into the post-television era.

Congratulate me! I’ve achieved perfect incoherence. Impressive, eh?

The PC marketplace is now saturated. Every consumer who wants one has one. Every seat in every business that needs a PC has a PC.

And we’ve just about reached the point where the software people use the most no longer requires more and more RAM and CPU cycles.

Which means the only reasons anyone has to buy a new PC are (1) the old one has worn out; or (2) they’re starting a new business or growing the one they have, and need them for the employees they’re hiring.

We aren’t entering the “post-PC” era. We’re entering the PC-and-a-bunch-of-other-stuff era. Call it the PC-plus era if that’s less of a mouthful. Here are the main pluses and what they mean to you:

VDI: Virtual desktops, the trend that refused to start. Instead of using the storage and processing power that’s sitting right in front of each user, you’re supposed to prefer a bunch of additional servers, more complexity in your networks, and more draw on the limited AC power you’re able to pipe into your data center.

VDI is real, but not general-purpose. It’s fine for production workers whose responsibilities are limited to a fixed set of enterprise applications. You can save a few bucks (but less than you might think) by buying specialized VDI terminals for them, and you will gain a bit of control, so what the heck.

A variant … offline VDI, where each PC image is managed centrally, but is executed locally … would be a terrific possibility for BYOD, if only the user’s device was a Windows tablet that could support it (Android and iOS-based tablets just can’t handle the load). Beyond that? Mostly, you’ll irritate people.

Employee smartphones and tablets: Business travel is annoying, as anyone who does a lot of it can explain in much more detail than anyone else wants to hear. The last thing you need to do is make it more annoying by forcing travelers to haul two laptops along — the one IT provides for business use, which is already an annoyance, plus their personal laptop to handle personal business, which doesn’t go away just because they’re traveling.

IT can make a lot of friends by providing smartphone apps that provide secure access to basic functionality for enterprise applications, plus a VDI client for tablets that allows travelers who don’t need to do a lot of computer work do what they do need to do on a tablet.

Consumer PCs, smartphones and tablets: This is what will hurt the most. Consumers will continue to use PCs to interact with your company’s website. Nothing you’re doing now will go away.

Meanwhile, a lot of them will also want to use the functionality you provide through your website on their smartphones. Casual customers (and “customers” who don’t buy from you but do want your content) will be happy to use their phone’s browser … often, they won’t even care if you don’t provide a specialized version of your website built for the smartphone’s small screen.

But regular customers will want an app for that … not only because an app’s user interface is designed from the ground up to be useful on their smartphone, but because the whole experience is smoother. Make that two apps — one for iOS, the other for Android. And you never know … if Microsoft is able to sell Lumias in any quantity, you might have to make it three.

Then you’ll need another set of apps designed for the tablet’s form factor.

Oh … and you probably won’t get to add any staff to handle all of this additional responsibility.

What can you do about it?

Oops. Sorry … we’re out of space. Stay tuned for next week’s episode of All Things Considered I think I’ll Take Up Organic Farming.

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Full disclosure: My employer, Dell, sells lots of products and services connected to this week’s topic. None of the folks who are responsible have asked my opinion, though. In the interest of symmetry I haven’t asked them for theirs, either.

Thoughts from an Oregon vacation:

Experts experience a different world (1): In Sideways, Miles and Maya (Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen) have a deep, touching conversation about Pinot Noir. They sipped their wine and envisioned the work of growing the grapes, the weather, the scenery, the vintner’s technique … entire vicarious lives.

I experienced flavor.

Relevant IT insight: When non-technical managers overhear a conversation between two engineers and have no idea what’s being said, many shake their heads and roll their eyes. They should be delighted.

Experts experience a different world (2): When you tour wineries you mostly taste young wines — in our case, 2006 vintages. A young Pinot Noir really doesn’t taste very good to a palette as unsophisticated as mine.

A wine connoisseur can taste a 2006 Pinot Noir and predict when it will be ready to drink and what it will taste like … and enjoy the future flavor now. Great vintners taste the grapes and know how to create that flavor.

Relevant IT insight: By the end of the design phase of any systems effort, at least one person in IT, and another in each affected area of the business, must be able to envision the experience of using the future system. Otherwise, while the new system might meet all requirements and specifications, it will still be a mess.

What you like and what you should ask for aren’t always the same: My wife and I generally prefer red wines. As most of the wines were quite young, the whites were far more enjoyable.

Relevant IT insight: When making management choices, what you like doesn’t matter at all. Base your choices on what the situation calls for. Anything else is your ego at work.

You can’t optimize for everything: Joe and Shari Lobenstein — the proprietors of Lobenhaus, our wine country Bed and Breakfast (highly recommended) — also grow a small grape crop. Joe invited us to taste his Riesling and Pinot Noir grapes, which were ready to harvest.

The flavor was astonishing compared to supermarket grapes. So were the seeds, which make up a lot of these grapes.

It’s too bad, but you can’t get the flavor without the seeds.

Relevant IT insight: IT optimization also involves trade-offs. Move to a higher-bandwidth technology and you might find you’ve increased latency to unacceptable levels. Adopt a highly scalable process and you’ll likely find you’ve increased overhead costs, reducing your flexibility.

And so on.

The outside view tells you little about the inside view: You can only taste so much wine, so we spent an afternoon at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, the final resting place of Howard Hughes’ legendary “Spruce Goose.”

From the outside it looks like a very big airplane. When you enter and look the length of it, enormous looks small in comparison.

Relevance to IT: For business management, the experience is features and functionality. For business users, the experience is the user interface. Both are important. Neither provides useful information about what a system looks like from the inside.

But you already knew that.

Sometimes, what you get is better than what you’d planned: One of the exhibits was a Boeing B17G Flying Fortress — the workhorse bomber of World War II.

Bill Jarvis, the volunteer who showed us around the B17, piloted 30 missions over Germany in WWII, starting when he was 18-and-a-half years old.

On Bill’s last mission the Germans finally shot him down. He crash-landed in a sugar beet field in Luxemburg. Allied troops immediately took the entire crew prisoner, not sure if they were really Americans or were Germans trained to infiltrate.

After weeks of imprisonment and interrogation, Bill finally had enough. He told the MPs, in terms that weren’t uncertain and were laced with every cuss word he could think of, that he was going to see the General and they’d just have to shoot him if they wanted to stop him.

When he swore at the General in similar terms, the General concluded he had to be an American — no German could have had such a colorful vocabulary — and freed Bill and his crew.

Bill’s story is too long for this space, so you’ll just have to visit him at Evergreen. He says about half of it is true, but he can’t recall which half.

We’d planned to admire airplanes. Our best experience was talking to a World War II pilot.

Relevance to IT: In the end, technology and process are never as interesting or as important as the people who use them.

But you already knew that, too.