What a quaint sounding article. “PC Fails of 2013” sounds like an old-school musical like “Sunshine Follies of ’36.” It’s the name of an article I wrote about almost a decade ago, in which I said PCs would never recover from the slump they were in. When will I ever get tired of being wrong?
Realistically, PCs didn’t ever recover but the bar has been lowered somewhat. We don’t expect PCs to be the tech darling they were in the 90s any more than we expect Toni Braxton to be the darling she was in the 90s. Things change. Back then, PCs were really the only electronic device there was. In the early days of the internet, you went into a room, sat down, and dialed in. The idea that you could take the internet with you was years from becoming reality.
Today’s PCs share the spotlight with phones, tablets, Chromebooks, and all manner of connected devices. The things we do with these devices were unthinkable in the PC’s heyday. I’d wager that as many people use PCs as ever did, but they also use other things.
It could have gone much worse
Still, the article is an interesting snapshot of a time when we thought things would get much, much worse, and we wondered how people with desk jobs would ever be able to work the way they were. Microsoft had disappointed people so profoundly with an operating system that didn’t actually operate on a desktop, and people were clinging to their antique PCs in horror just hoping they wouldn’t break.
Back then I imagined a cottage industry springing up fixing old PCs because places like doctors’ offices and tire shops were terrified of going to Windows 8. That actually might have been good news for the environment, but it would have been a deeply destabilizing force for businesses. That never happened largely because Microsoft smartened up and made Windows 10 something we can all live with.
I’m still not sure Windows 11 is a step up, but it’s not as profound of a step back as I’d feared. Microsoft still hasn’t learned that we don’t want our PCs to be cool or interesting. We want them to work for us while we do what we need to do.
Some companies never did really recover
On the other hand, Asus, Acer, and other mid-tier manufacturers never recovered from those days. Microsoft’s own hardware division has taken a lot of the “oomph” from those PC makers. While the market for PC hardware is strong, it’s never going to be as strong as it once was. With Microsoft expanding, someone else had to shrink.
Ah, well… reading old articles like that just makes me wonder what I’ll be wrong about next.
