The post-PC era is about coolness or lack thereof

Some have pointed to the popularity of tablets as the indicator for the imminent demise of the PC. I look at the "post PC" era not as the death of the PC, but as something worse: PCs have become boring.

Looking back, we can see that PCs started with lots of excitement and enthusiasm, yet that excitement has diminished over time.

First, consider hardware:

• Microcomputers were cool (even with just a front panel and a tape drive for storage)
• ASCII terminals were clearly better than front panels
• Storing data on floppy disks was clearly better than storing data on tape
• Hard drives were better than floppy disks
• Color monitors were better than monochrome displays
• High resolution color monitors were better than low resolution color monitors
• Flat panel monitors were better than CRT monitors

These were exciting improvements. These changes were *cool*. But the coolness factor has evaporated. Consider these new technologies:

• LED monitors are better than LCD monitors, if you're tracking power consumption
• Solid state drives are better than hard drives, if you look hard enough
• Processors after the original Pentium are nice, but not excitingly nice

Consider operating systems:

• CP/M was exciting (as anyone who ran it could tell you)
• MS-DOS was clearly better than CP/M
• Windows 3.1 on DOS was clearly better than plain MS-DOS
• Windows 95 was clearly better than Windows 3.1
• Windows NT (or 2000) was clearly better than Windows 95 (or 98, or ME)

But the coolness factor declined with Windows XP and its successors:

• Windows XP was *nice* but not *cool*
• Windows Vista was not clearly better than Windows XP -- and many have argued that it was worse
• Windows 7 was better than Windows Vista, in that it fixed problems
• Windows 8 is (for most people) not cool

The loss of coolness is not limited to Microsoft. A similar effect happened with Apple's operating systems.

• DOS (Apple's DOS for Apple ][ computers) was cool
• MacOS was clearly better than DOS
• MacOS 9 was clearly better than MacOS 8
• Mac OSX was clearly better than MacOS 9

But the Mac OSX versions have not been clearly better than their predecessors. They have some nice features, but the improvements are small, and a significant number of people might say that the latest OSX is not better than the prior version.

The problem for PCs (including Apple Macintosh PCs) is the loss of coolness. Tablets are cool; PCs are boring. The "arc of coolness" for PCs saw its greatest rise in the 1980s and 1990s, a moderate rise in the 2000s, and now sees decline.

This is the meaning of the "post PC era". It's not that we give up PCs. It's that PCs become dull and routine. PC applications become dull and routine.

It also means that there will be few new things developed for PCs. In a sense, this happened long ago, with the development of the web. Then, the Cool New Things were developed to run on servers and in browsers. Now, the Cool New Things will be developed for the mobile/cloud platform.

So don't expect PCs and existing PC applications to vanish. They will remain; it is too expensive to re-build them on the mobile/cloud platform.

But don't expect new PC applications.

Welcome to the post-PC era.

Mine is bigger than yours

People have noticed that apps for the iPhone (and Android phones) are easier to use than the standard PC applications. They are easier to install, easier to run, and they tend to run without crashing.

Why are the two so different? I think that the answer started in marketing.

PCs and cell phones are advertised differently. Personal computers are sold on power; cell phones are sold on convenience.

In 1981, the IBM PC entered a market that already had other computers, and the vast majority of users were men. The IBM PC competed on power: a faster and more capable CPU, more memory, more pixels on the screen, more sales offices, ... you get the idea.

Software for the IBM PC competed on the same basis. Word processors advertised the number of fonts, spreadsheet advertised the number of cells, compilers advertised the number of features. Advertising in the PC age (for hardware and software) was a game of "mine is bigger than yours".

The Apple iPhone, on the other hand, entered a market devoid of direct competition. Yes, there were other cell phones, but the iPhone set a new standard for cell phones. Whereas the IBM PC was perhaps thirty percent better than the Apple II and TRS-80 computers, the iPhone was more than one hundred percent better. It was a new creature.

I'm sure that Apple knew that the market for iPhones would include women as well as men. That may have pushed them to market convenience. Or not; I don't know their motivation. it is a difference that we can analyze for a long time.

The bottom line is that the iPhone was sold on the basis of "easy to use" and "coolness". It was not sold on "bigger and therefore better".

It's relatively easy to deliver "bigger and better". (Not completely easy, as IBM and later Microsoft learned from the need for backwards-compatibility, but possible.) Delivering "coolness" is hard. "Coolness" has a psychological component that is absent from the pure "big hardware" solution.

The coolness aspect is what Microsoft products need. Microsoft has improved Windows, designed game systems, and built cell phones and music players, but all within the mindset of "bigger than the other guy". Even their Visual Studio IDE is bigger and more capable than Eclipse and the other IDEs, but not cooler. It's just bigger.

If Microsoft wants to compete in the new age, they must learn coolness. They must forget "mine is bigger than yours" and make products truly desirable.

Come to think of it, if *you* want to compete, you must learn coolness.