Yet another "analyst" article regarding the irrelevance of PC industry. The fact is, PC is not going to go away. The analysts always fail to account of the huge number of customized software running in the corporate sectors all around the world. It is impossible to replace all of them overnight, not possible to do that in a few years, and not even in 10 years. Simply because of the amount of skilled knowledge and costs involved.
What really has happened, is that PC does not enough incremental upgrade to force the users to buy new hardware just to have the better features. PC now, is like an air-conditioner or a freezer or a TV. Once you buy one of them, it lasts for several years. The need to repeat the purchase usually only happens when the old one break downs. The market now is substantially smaller because of this. PC vendors, so used to the huge volume in the past, have grown too big and now finding it hard to adjust to the new market behavior. In fact, it is likely that HP or Dell will never see the same PC shipment volume ever again. PC, will go into the same common household electrical appliance category such as a washing machine or a freezer. People will continue to need them, but they will not buy them as often as before. Do you see any electrical company making a single product nowadays? No, they have diversified into making several products, and so all existing PC vendors such as HP, Dell, Acer etc will have to do as well. The huge PC market has disappear and will be replaced with a smaller one, either these companies have to scale down in size, or have to learn to diversify to make products instead of only making computer related equipments. This has been going on for some time with both Intel and AMD unable to deliver significantly faster CPUs, and that has caused even entry level computers are essentially good enough for most needs, and profit has been dropping as every PC vendor struggle to retain market share and drive profit margin to the bottom.
In fact, tablet and smart phone are quickly heading into this direction as well. Once the market become saturated and incremental upgrade does not deliver enough value, same thing will happen, market will shrink, and revenue will drops. Those companies like Apple which has a few products will be affected most, while companies making lots of lots of different products like Samsung will be less affected.