Among the topics covered last night on the ABC Nightlife tech segment was the post-PC era as Windows 10 is launched to an indifferent marketplace.
Some of the listeners didn’t take kindly to describing the current tech market as being the post PC world while others were distressed at the idea we’d be losing our DVD and CD players as software, games and music goes online.
The main concern from listeners was they would be losing their disk collections. This is interesting as cloud computing, streaming and digital downloads marked the death knell of physical electronic media five years ago. It seems some people haven’t quite realised the model we’re moving to.
For the music, games and software industries having cloud based online services or downloads brings many advantages – not least the promise of recurring revenue rather than the lumpy one off sales of physical box sales.
Customers though are not so well served; while business users get the benefits of reduce up front capital costs, consumers at home are faced with paying a monthly fee to access their music or games collections.
In the worst case, they can find themselves cut off should there be a change of policies or some arbitrary breach of conditions.
Despite the downsides, the cloud model is now the way digital media is being distributed. The DVD an the CD is going the way of the vinyl record.