PC Sales continue to fall

Gartner announced PC shipments were down again this quarter, 10.9%. I think this marks the second largest drop in PC sales in history, the largest being last quarter when sales fell by 14% - almost exactly 3 years after the iPad was released.  

When people review their own technology choices, this news undoubtedly makes sense. Have you bought a Windows 8 PC lately? Yeah, me either.

This marks the fifth consecutive quarter of declining shipments, which is the longest duration of decline in the PC market’s history. - Gartner

We're in the midst of the biggest change to computing since the introduction of the PC itself. If you're in the IT profession this is obviously pretty important, but this vantage point also isolates the person from the true reality. If you spend your day living PC, it's hard to imagine the world changing that drastically.  But changing it is and the pace of change is accelerating. 

There are people all over the United States sitting in a class room right now learning about running an organization via the client-server architecture. An architecture, that while it will won't disappear, is becoming increasingly marginalized. I'd walk out of the classroom today and begin learning about building web or mobile apps as quickly as I could. 

Most businesses do not want servers, period. "Can't I get rid of my servers?" Many can and many have but there are still times where client-server is the best or only option.

This ALL changes as bandwidth speeds improve. Large files are one of the last components necessitating local resources for many organizations. As bandwidth speeds move towards 1 Gbps, the speed at which we can move things to and from the Cloud becomes closer to the speed at which we can save to a local server or even our own computer. Most of us don't care if the server is in the closet or part of a global computing architecture - we're going to use what works best and is most cost effective.

As the Web, intrinsically mobile, becomes more powerful the local OS, the PC OS, becomes less so.

Sales of one PC OS are growing faster than all others, Chrome OS. It's no surprise that this system blurs the lines between the browser and the legacy operating system the most - at the end of the day they are the same.