Post mortem for the PC

     In the end, we got really great PCs. The laptop I type these words on routinely handles video calls with friends and family around the world. I watch whole movies on it. I use online utilities to record and edit my music with it (my retirement hobby). It fits in a large manila envelope, costs a few hundred bucks and has two ports to handle its every external need. And yes -- take a bow, Jim -- they are USB.

Annual PC sales leapt from less than 20 million a year when I started covering the industry in 1988 to peaks of more than 300 million a year since 2000. The PC became tech’s first giant consumer phenomenon. More than two billion systems are in use around the globe today.

But that was just the warm up.

At the time we knew something big would come from mobile computing, but we never guessed just how pervasive or transformative it might be.

As early as 1999, folks started talking about a post-PC era though it was far from clear what that might look like. In a 1992 keynote, Apple CEO John Sculley said folks would carry multiple kinds of pocket-sized personal digital assistants or PDAs. In 1995, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touted the Network PC, aka NP, a simple device that was basically a Web terminal and would eventually cost less than $500.  (In those days a high-end PCs were priced at $2,000 and up.)

Long term, neither vision panned out. Folks wanted just two or three very capable devices of different sizes – as it turned out, a handset, a computer and a digital TV.

Rich Wallace and Ron Wilson loved to amplify the talk about a post-PC era. They never stopped berating the PC industry, and Wintel in particular, as low tech. I quietly disagreed – PC shipments were still rising rapidly and the laptop had yet to come into its glory – but I understood their deep disenchantment.

The PC era left a lot of wreckage in its wake.

Take IBM, the archetype of the big American tech company and one of the first big corporations to get on board with the PC. Ultimately it sold off its laptop and PC server groups to China’s Lenovo. It continued to be a leader in semiconductor technology for many years, but its novel products failed to catch big markets. Its chip operations shrunk, and in 2019 it lost its position, held for more than a decade, as the leader in US patents.

A more recent milestone of its decline was the announcement in 2025 that it would close its Almaden Research Center. Today the R&D hub proudly looks out over Silicon Valley from a hilltop in a county park. It was a meeting point, a sort of tech observatory, for top thinkers on the issues of the day. I attended perhaps a dozen events there, the last one a heady discussion of AI.


IBM's Almaden Research Center

Down from its peak annual revenues of more than $100 billion, IBM is far from out. It’s morphed into a robust consulting company that’s still active in chips, mainly the Power CPUs for its Z systems, mainframes that continue to run banks and governments around the world.

Bill Gates, for his part, refurbished his reputation as a ruthless competitor.

When he was done with Microsoft, Gates poured energy and billions into a foundation to fight diseases, climate change and more. Reading about the foundation’s work, I gained a new respect for him.  I even imagined putting away my reporter’s steno pad and applying for a job there.

But I didn’t. I was hooked on being a tech reporter, writing about next-big-things that would eventually include the internet, the rise of giant data centers and AI. But before all that arrived on the horizon, I was on the trail of another sea change -- mobile computing

Coming soo: The long and winding road to the iPhone

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