Is the PC doomed? Is it going to be replaced by other types of computing devices? Where does all the negative and repetitive message about the end of the PC come from? The enormous success of PostPC devices as breakthrough innovation and cloud computing makes us think that the market for the old PC is going to disappear.
In an interview with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, he commented that we were going to the PostPC era in which people would stop using their lifelong personal computers to much simpler computers based on the technology of smartphones.
The breakthrough innovation process
In reality, Jobs was indirectly citing the late Clayton Christensen, who coined the theory of breakthrough innovations or theory. The idea of this theory is that from time to time technologies appear that perform the same work as other existing ones, but in a more accessible way. Two historical examples of breakthrough innovation with the car, which ended up completely replacing horse carts, and digital cameras, which replaced reel cameras.
Christensen claimed that the reason why companies in the technology sector fall from the absolute top to be completely replaced. The reason for this is because manufacturers that already have a consolidated product on the market do not believe that it is necessary to re-consider a new solution or a more accessible version than the existing solution, which is the one they sell.
The peculiarity of breakthrough innovations is that they are not born from a market study or from a consumer request, so they are not usually predictable, in addition, they start with very low specifications so they are not to the taste of the party. most demanding and enthusiastic on the market.
The theory states that as new iterations of breakthrough innovation come out, it is scaling more and more in the market, getting to displace the technology it supplants in consumption. However, this is not always the case and in most cases this does not occur due to the fact that the complete process does not occur, especially when the technology that is the breakthrough innovation is not good enough.
Is the breaking process happening on the PC?
If the Steve Jobs claim made by Steve Jobs in his day were true, then PostPC devices would have completely replaced the traditional PC, but this is not how it has happened.
The reason for it? Hardware is nothing more than the tool we use to run the software, and as long as the programs we use on a day-to-day basis require the hardware that we have in our PCs, they will not be replaced in their daily use and will continue to be sold.
The process of replacing the PC by PostPC devices has not occurred and will not occur as long as the hardware of the PostPC devices is designed for much lower power consumption, which makes the power of the PostPC devices lower than that of the PCs of a lifetime.
