I think the author isn’t thinking far enough ahead.
The four basic hardware types out there are phone, pad, notebook and desktop. I think in five years all but the phone will have largely disappeared as “computers.”
The formats will still be used, but will be only dumb data wireless entry and display platforms for your phone, within which all data manipulation and storage will take place, with auto backup to the cloud. So a pad will be only a display device that allows you to read or do other stuff more efficiently than on your small phone. Cost, maybe$100?
Think about it. You always have your phone with you, and the phone AFAIK has the potential to handle internally all the processing and storage, though perhaps not now. So why would you want to use three or four platorms and OSs instead of one, or spend time manually syncing them?
The OS that allows you to move seamlessly from one platform to another, espcially with effective backwards compatability, wil dominate, probably as much as MS did in its heyday.
W8 is not this OS, but it looks like a step in that direction.
Don’t fall for it. The phone will get more powerful but will always have compromises to allow it to run off of a battery. I want the bigger processor that runs at higher voltage and has more gates.
Ask businesses that run on the cloud how that worked for them last week when Amazon’s cloud service went dark for a good part of the day. I like the cloud and use the cloud but work I depend on exist on a drive I can touch with a backup and a backup of that on the cloud.
You can’t do art work, sound editing and pictures on a phone. Keeping databases on a phone...forget it. PC’s and laptops won’t go away, they’ll simply act as the mobile phone computers’ home bases.
You think I want to save all my data to the cloud without my own personal hard back ups? What with Obama’s ability to shut the internet down? Nuts!
I actually agree with you. Last week I went to a user group meeting and only took my iPad to the meeting because I knew I could manage 99% of problems through it either using Citrix interface or VPN.
I seriously doubt that notebooks and desktops will disappear in 5 years for the business users. For mass consumption? Maybe.
A lot of light-duty users are already shifting to phones or tablets as their primary Internet device. A similar shift already took place in 2008, when laptops started outselling desktops. They are "good enough," but phones will never replace laptops which will never replace desktops for simple reasons of physics: Space and power.
No matter how good the processor in a phone gets, a laptop can have ten of them, and a desktop fifty (or the equivalent in fewer chips). Anything a phone or tablet can do, a laptop or desktop will be able to do faster. Until someone comes up with a micro-fusion reactor that produces unlimited power in nearly no space and weight, larger machines have a permanent advantage.
I think Apple is onto something with Siri -- not the voice commands, but the way it processes them. The phone is essentially a terminal that offloads the heavy processing tasks to a remote data center. Even with fast networks, that won't do for anything that requires real-time responses, but it could expand the tasks available for portable devices.