What really signed the PC's death warrant? Microsoft's decision to support netbooks
Summary: Some of the reasons for the collapse of the the PC market go a lot further back than the reception of Windows 8.
When Asus introduced its Eee netbooks running Linux, it heralded a flood of cheap-and-cheerful small machines that used tiny amounts of cheap USB-connected flash storage and didn't run Windows.
Users flocked to them because they were cheap and in many cases mistook them for small laptops that would work like their familiar full-size laptops.
PC makers switched to putting Windows XP on their netbooks. That still didn't make a netbook a real cheap notebook, though — for that you needed an expensive ultraportable with a business price tag — but it validated the concept.
As did the way Microsoft reacted. Microsoft saw netbooks as a significant enough threat to explicitly develop Windows 7 to run on them.
That was also a response to the problems of Vista, which only ran well on a brand new PC with a powerful new processor and the then-rare full 4Gb of memory. Having then-Windows chief Seven Sinofsky show off the netbook he was using as his main PC on stage at the Windows 7 PDC showed that Microsoft was serious about not letting Windows 7 be another 'bloated' operating system (on a new PC Vista actually performed rather well).
And knowing your boss is running daily builds on a netbook has to concentrate the mind of a Windows developer on performance and battery issues. Every PC user saw the performance benefit of that work.
But by taking netbooks so seriously, Microsoft also enabled the race to the bottom that has culminated in $99 Android tablets. Instead of user experience or usability, OEMs concentrated on knocking out the cheapest possible devices they could sell. Never mind the quality, feel the width - or never mind the profit, we'll make it up in volume, as the old jokes go.
Perhaps, if Microsoft hadn't blinked, if it had said that Windows didn't actually scale down to a tiny little screen and a hard-to-use keyboard, if it had concentrated on making Windows a powerful premium experience that was also easy to use, the PC market wouldn't have collapsed quite the way it has.
This, admittedly, would have relied on OEMs actually delivering premium hardware that wasn't compromised by crapware - or on Microsoft launching its own PCs much earlier than it did.
Microsoft would have had to come up with something for the budget market and it would have had to be something that ran Office - but given that Microsoft discontinued the free Office Starter offering, it's likely that netbooks running it didn't actually convinced many people to upgrade to pay-for Office.
Perhaps ignoring netbooks instead of legitimising them as a major PC sector would have kept PCs as the high-margin devices like Apple Macs.
Tablets would still have come along, but the PC industry wouldn't have cut its own throat and devalued the PC name in a race to the bottom. And maybe that would have left space to deliver more Windows 7 ultraportables that could do what people actually wanted netbooks for, while Windows RT was under development.
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
Damned If they did, damned if they didn't
A good start...
With electricity prices sky rocketing at the moment, I'm happy that the amount of power used to run a Windows PC keeps on dropping.
There's certainly a lot of speculation, either way
There was an article on allthingsd yesterday that was saying the netbook was dying, and tablet had killed it. Mary's article is a similar subject from a different viewpoint. I commented at allthingsd that netbooks sales boosted PC sales the last few years. Without the netbook, PC sales would have been declining for some time now. Acer has gone from the #2 PC maker to a distant fourth.
As Alan said, Linux scared the bejeebers out of Microsoft. In the meantime, tablets became popular. Tablets are now scaring the bejeebers out of Microsoft. No matter what decisions Microsoft might have made, we probably probably end up in the same spot. Microsoft had little control over external market factors.
To Microsoft's credit, Windows RT performs well on all processor platforms. Legacy Windows can tax an Atom processor and won't work on ARM. Project MinWin appears to have been a success. This is the true re-imagining of Windows. Microsoft has come a long way in a short period of time. But it means legacy can't die quick enough. Legacy Windows is not in Microsoft's future. A great start would be to release their mini tablet as an RT only device.
But first Microsoft has to finish Windows 8. Complete system functionality must be accessible from Metro (Control Panel, drivers, file system, Office.) Project Blue will solve everything?! The Office team seems to be chomping at the bit to release a touch based product. Microsoft could pull this off.
With Microsoft
Windows 7 was the third version of Windows Vista.
Windows XP, with as much praise as it gets now, was a real DOG of an OS until after SP4.
And so it continues to go.
Anything...
So many things wrong...
In fact what netbooks showed was that PCs had become far more powerful than the average user needed them to be. A netbook like the Acer One series provided all the power that a user needed: it ran Word just fine so your kid could do his school work, and ran web browsers just as well so you could get online. The only thing you couldn't do on one was high end gaming, but by that point in time, that's what your Xbox was for.
Was Microsoft "foolish" for validating netbooks by supporting them? More like Microsoft saw a threat posed by cheap laptops running Linux and rushed to stamp out the fire.
I find it somewhat puzzling that people bemoan the emergence of inexpensive computing devices, as if the consumer somehow benefits from paying high prices for technology he doesn't need. Buying a $1200.00 ultra-book when all you need is a netbook or a tablet is like putting 93 octane gas in a Honda Civic. You're just throwing money away for no good reason.
Agreed
There is however a grain of truth that Windows 8 is killing PC sales, it and Windows 7 both need less hardware than previous versions, which means that people just don't need to upgrade their old hardware any more. If it is still running, people will still use it, they are only really replacing their kit when it breaks - although with the people I know, this seems to have been the case since about 2000...
People are replacing their hardware every decade, instead of every 18 months, because the new hardware doesn't provide any cost benefit. In the old days, where software was always half a step ahead of what the hardware could provide, people had to upgrade, now the move is to lower powered, more portable devices, so the software has stopped waisting resources, so the older hardware with more power and memory is running better than ever.
Actually...
At any rate, the netbook certainly didn't convince me that I didn't need a new desktop; quite the opposite. Though it was adequate for getting things done, I was really feeling its lack of speed, power and display size. I got a proper rig again as soon as I was able, and replaced my husband's this Christmas. Before retail sales of Windows 7 are discontinued I fully intend to upgrade my daughter's.
To address a point in the article, I should also note that, though small and low in price, not all netbooks are/were of poor quality. Mine is a pretty sturdy little beast; it was purchased used and has taken a fair amount of abuse since, and it's still working fine.
Moores Law
Finally, someone else sees it.
A big part of the decline in PC sales is that there is no new killer app that requires a stronger PC. Unless you like PC gaming, there just is not a big reason to get a bigger, faster PC. My five year old portable does everything that a new portable will do. It even runs Windows 8, and it runs all but the latest games, and most of those better than most new portables.
So.....why upgrade?
Windows 8's biggest problem may be that it does not offer enough to make people want a new PC to run it, and it certainly does not require the latest hardware, which compounds the problem.
I have said it many times, in relation to the iPad, but here I will change it to match the article and phrase it for netbooks.
The lesson of the netbook (or iPad) is that most users do not need the computing power of a PC.
And even if you do not want a tablet, and you want a real keyboard, you can buy a relatively good portable for little more than a mediocre tablet.
it's about experience
poor Surface then
Form factor is such an obvious thing its not worth commenting on, of course a small screen is small! Users with such devices do not expect to run programs that require a huge amount of screen space to operate effectively.
The article is still poor, but I think the race to kill the PC market wasn't by making Windows more efficient - they've been doing that ever since they saw benchmarks showing Linux booted to desktop faster and Vista was a dog.
Incidentally, I think the reason people who upgrade get a faster experience is because all the cruft that's built up over time in Windows is gone when they re-install. Hardware differences are almost un-noticeable nowadays, even when I upgraded my boot HDD to a SSD, I noticed boot times was a lot faster.. but that was it. The whole thing still works just the same as before - because the difference isn't dramatic enough to actually notice even if it performance is improved.
Your experience is entirely opposite to mine
My first laptop with built-in SSD spoiled me for ever. My 13" Core-i5 Sony Vaio Z Series with SSD ran rings around my Core-i7 MacBook Pro which had a 5400rpm HDD. So much so in fact, that I finally bit the bullet and bought a Samsung 840Pro SSD for my MBP. The difference is night and day. Big apps that used to take several tens of seconds to open now open in 3-5s (e.g. Visual Studio, Photoshop, Outlook). Smaller apps open instantaneously.
Even though I typically only reboot my machines once a month (and even that is done automatically at night), being able to reboot in less than 40s is astonishingly liberating. I no longer begrudge rebooting because it's now faster to reboot than it was to open a single large app!
Regarding resolution: "netbook market grew by more than 160 percent quarter-on-quarter during Q3 of 2008" and "Netbooks commonly come with a resolution of either 1024×600 or 800×480."
I think Mary was noting the high-end netbook's horizontal 1024px resolution, not vertical. Excel on a 1366x768 Surface RT is reasonably comfortable for most light-medium use, but a Surface Pro's 1920 x 1080 screen, it's better than most laptops and can easily be zoomed in/out or the DPI settings altered if the screen density is too high.
"gbjbaanb2" said ...
This was certainly true with Windows XP - which was absolutely terrible at disk management. But Windows 7/8 does all of these chores exceptionally well so the need to periodically re-build a system is long gone.
No, Still needs periodic reboots
The problems come from many programs and are not all Microsoft caused.
Re: The problems come from many programs and are not all Microsoft
background apps
True but ...
Most of today's tablets - wither their small screens have the same problems - but most tablets are consumption devices - not like netbooks, which were perceived as production devices.
Agreed
cheap is a problem
Also, the race to the bottom has been a real problem for OEMs, because there is almost no profit margin in a portable PC these days. They have to shave every penny and they care much more about profit margins than they do about quality products.
I spent ten years at Dell watching things go down the drain. Dell launched the price war and now the entire industry is paying the price.
Cheap prices may be good for consumers, but only if they get a quality product for that price. A cheap POS is still a cheap POS and buyers might find themselves a little happier if they would spend a little more money.