tippit -
good questions. Let me see if I can shed any light.
I would be interested in your take on the long term prospects for PCs in general
One trend that is obviously emerging on the desktop is increasing modularity. USB and 1394 (firewire) allow construction of a box which has almost no configuration requirements, and where the components are as easy to add as plugging a phone into the wall. That implies that the end user can create unique configurations just by plugging up what he needs. That will change the whole game for everyone, since it affects the manufacturing, distribution, and inventory issues across the board.
Within the near term (say over the next 18 to 24 months) I would expect that the base commercial desktop system will be essentially a hub with CPU and memory, and everything else will just plug in. This will affect the upgrade cycle since the central unit becomes just another replaceable component. A corollary to that is that there will be no 'big piece' from a cost standpoint. The central unit might cost more than the other pieces (disk etc) but not a lot more. Consumer products will move to an appliance model - think VCR rather than computer for the user model in terms of ease of use and cost.
There are huge customer satisfaction issues which get solved by this. The hardware self-configures, so building or changing a system is nearly painless. Upgrading a system would no longer imply loading a new OS - just plug in your old peripherals and you're back up.
Dropping down from the cosmic for a moment, the upgrade cycles in today's world are faster in the consumer space than in commercial - about 12 months for consumer and 18 months for commercial. Hardware currently stays in the commercial system for about 3 years, so half of the HW gets refreshed every 18 months or so in those accounts. It is not always obvious at the user level since these are macro views, but that gives a feel for the velocity of the technology cycles.
In the future I believe that the refresh cycles will be faster but the amount of technology refreshed on a percentage basis will be slower. The net should be about the same with less waste and higher customer satisfaction. My crystal ball gets a little murky somewhere 2 years or so out since there are so many variables in play - the use of the internet as a system component, the trend to component architectures at every level including storage, the need to virtualize the user independent from the system components he or she uses create a lot of options.
hope that at least responds to your question. I know this was skimming the surface of some deep topics and I would be glad to discuss in more depth if you are interested. |
