Death of the PC. The authoritative guide  to the decline of the PC and the rise of post-PC devices. Max Baxter-Reynolds. 2013. ISBN 9780957177840.  The tile was intended to be provocative. The author does see a role for PC’s going forward – for doing work in an office like setting. What does make a good case for is the rise of a plethora of specialty PC machines that are more single minded and not used for work.  He tries very hard to stay machine agnostic so the book has a bit more staying power.   That said he does a pretty good job of putting a spike into the efforts of Microsoft and Blackberry.

Blackberry is doomed because the bulk of any market will support up to 3 different variants on a type, thus for smartphones BBerry is now fourth and falling. I agree and he is completely correct in that the BBerry business units failed to develop tools for developers that extended the platform beyond Mail, Outlook and messaging. This made it too hard for developers.  Apple understood this at the get go and thus an explosion of IOS apps followed the iphone introduction..

Microsoft is doomed until it realizes that going forward not all machines need Office, that there will exist more single use machines that do a great job in non Office uses. The insistence on preserving Office on Windows 8 units makes a hybrid box that has a tremendous increase in complexity – which is counter to what is going on in IOS and Android.   My experience with Windows8/Office 2013 is not that great. I use Windows products less and less each month.

The author makes a telling story on the disappearing reliance on Microsoft at the end when how he details the writing and editing of this book on non Microsoft platforms (Google Docs, Calibre and open source graphics programs).  They used Word 97 for the very last print ready doc which was fed to Calibre for conversion to Mobi and to the Amazon print on demand application.

In my case I would have used an Open Office application for the print ready document.

If you go to his website www.theplatform.io  you can get 10% of this book to have a preview look.

 

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