The PC is No Longer the Center of the Universe

I was cleaning up my RSS feeds and came across this 9 month old blogpost (May 2nd 2008) from Amy Wohl.

Reason for posting a response 9 months later is to illustrate how time constraint some analysis can be.

“traditional vendors like Microsoft …” ? We are only 9 months further along. I do wonder if Amy still has the same opinion on the matter

Also funny to see Google become more “traditional”.. Offline Gmail …

At IBM’s Business Partner Leadership Conference, held this week in Los Angeles, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke on the state of computing and their vision for its future, both separately and togehter.  The big news is that they agree:

• We are moving from a PC-Centric world to a Network-Centric world filled with millions of devices of every shape and description.
• In this Network Centric world, the PC is just another device, of decreasing importance as the emerging economies come online with their preference for mobile platforms which more closely ressemble smart phones.
• In the Network Centric World, Open Standards and published APIs are very imortant so that new innovations can easily be attached to the network and become new platforms for deelopment.
• The cloud (very large scale shared computing, available for hire) will become uibiquitious, probably sold by platform providers who will recruit ecoosystems of ISVs and provide a well-managed, secure platform, freeing both customers and ISVs from the need to implement hardware where they lack the skills or capital.
• This networkcentric Computing model will require tons of storage and new interaces and methods to discover the information and manage it.
• This enables everyone to have more access to information.  Some of it will be stored in the cloud, but some of it will continue to be stored on site.  It’s a hybrid world.

Large traditional vendors like Microsoft will have to choose between adopting the open standards, network centric, cloud approach, finding a new market niche, and slowly becoming less relevant.  That’s why Microsoft’s chsing so hard after the consumer market with the Yahoo.

Source: The PC is No Longer the Center of the Universe

If the tradition is software and the innovation is services … Microsoft is doing pretty well …