General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears.
Ultimately it is
1. the nerds who educate (or fail to educate) the consumer market about what is possible using a general purpose PC and
2. the consumers who buy electronics, including general purpose PC's,
who are in control of the future production and general availability of them.
Common sense says that factories will only produce what can be sold. They respond to demand.
Touchscreen, keyboardless tablets and "smartphones" that cannot be connected and controlled with a more flexible general purpose computer are limiting not enabling.
This is however not the message being sent to consumers.
> General purpose PC's will only disappear if the market for them disappears.
I think this is the key point.
In some sense, the market for them has been disappearing. The rise of web and mobile apps has shown beyond any doubt that a lot of traditional software is far too big and complicated for a typical home user's needs, and that Joe Public can in fact be quite happy sharing his life story on a cloud-hosted blog, keeping up with his friends via Twitter, playing simple puzzle games on Facebook, and watching streaming movies on his iPad. Notice that all of these are just variations on consumption/communication using on-line services. Heavyweight tools like e-mail and word processors just aren't necessary for what most people care about in their daily lives at home. In fact, I suspect that for the average home consumer, open access to data (both their own personal information and multimedia content they have paid for) and the whole walled garden debate are going to be far bigger issues than open access to general purpose hardware and software.
On the flip side, there will always be enthusiasts who do want more flexible hardware and software for their own enjoyment. All of those activities I mentioned above use software written by geeks, running on infrastructure built by geeks and funded in large part by businesses. And businesses themselves have widely diverse requirements and build many software tools both in-house and to sell to the public and/or other businesses. In short, the entire global IT economy is built around geeks and business, and geeks and businesses need general purpose computing. No amount of lobbying by special interest groups is going to beat the combined might of a global economy that now depends fundamentally on progress in IT for its recovery and future success. If a few sites on the scale of Google and Facebook do go dark for a day in protest against SOPA, I think a few politicians, a lot of Big Media executives, and the entire Web-surfing population of the world are going to learn that lesson very quickly.
"In some sense, the market for them has been disappearing."
Agreed! That's what I thought the keynote would be about before I began watching. Users cared about general purpose computers before, because the only way you could accomplish a task was to run it on your own computer. Now, the thin clients are essentially here, and the ability to run an arbitrary program is not very important to many people.
Or so they think, anyway. I'm worried about the point where devices at home are not Turing-complete, and they just connect to authorized services. Only certain companies would really have the ability to program anything at all (because they'd be the only ones with real computers), and it would be easy for the government to step in and control them.
Ultimately it is
1. the nerds who educate (or fail to educate) the consumer market about what is possible using a general purpose PC and
2. the consumers who buy electronics, including general purpose PC's,
who are in control of the future production and general availability of them.
Common sense says that factories will only produce what can be sold. They respond to demand.
Touchscreen, keyboardless tablets and "smartphones" that cannot be connected and controlled with a more flexible general purpose computer are limiting not enabling.
This is however not the message being sent to consumers.