The PC is dying, long live the PC

The PC is set to dwindle into technological irrelevance as mobile devices become ever more sophisticated, according to an IBM executive.

Mark Dean, chief technology officer for IBM's Middle East and Africa division and one of the designers of IBM's first PC, delivered his assessment of the platform in a blogpost on Wednesday.

"When I helped design the PC, I didn't think I'd live long enough to witness its decline," he wrote. "But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they're no longer at the leading edge of computing."

Flexible, mobile computing is spurring invention, he believes. "It's becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact," he wrote.

Unfortunately the deskbound, unwieldy PC is not in the same class of devices that beget this social form of creation, so he believes the platform is doomed.

PCs are going "the way of the vacuum tubes, typewriters, vinyl records, CRT [displays] and incandescent light bulbs," he wrote.