Such graphs starkly illustrate how the industry is changing as people start using tablet and smartphones instead of their PCs but there are some caveats with making blanket comments about the death of the Windows based computer.

Sales are still huge

One important thing about the chart shown is it has a logrithmic scale – a doubling in height indicates ten times the sales.

That point alone shows just how massive the lead Windows had over 15 years from the mid-1990s, something that is shown in a previous Asymco chart.

Despite Gartner’s reported 1.4% fall in PC sales – the basis of the Asymco graphs – there are still 92 million personal computers sold each quarter so it is still a massive market.

Tethered devices

One of the weaknesses with smartphones and tablet computers is they are still tethered to the desktop. If you want to get the best experience from your phone or iPad you have to synch it with your home or office computer.

For the moment that’s going to continue for most users, but not forever and the extended life of PCs means customers are using older computers to connect.

Extended life cycles

A bigger problem for the PC manufacturers is the extended life cycle of personal computers.

Since the failure of Microsoft Vista, PC users have been weaned off the idea of replacing computers every three to five years and nearly half the market is using systems that are more than ten years old.

On its own that indicates fundamental problems with the Windows and PC markets for Microsoft and their manufacturing partners.

The irrelevant operating system

One of the effects of increased computer life cycles is that the operating system has become irrelevant. Customers no longer care about what they are using as long as it works.

This is one of Microsoft’s problems; the virus epidemic of last decade and various clunky versions of Windows Phones has left customers perceiving PC and Windows software as being clunky and buggy.

Not yet dead

While the PC market is now shrinking, it’s far from dead. There’s still a huge demand to cater for although the big growth days are over.

For manufacturers whose business model has been based on fighting for market share in a growing sector, they now have a problem. They have to identify profitable niches and generate innovative products.

Unfortunately for the PC industry, the market has moved on. Apple have captured the bulk of the high margin computer sector and the industry’s response of pushing “ultrabooks” to capture the MacBook Air customers isn’t going to resonate with consumers trained to buy cheap systems.

Watching the PC industry over the next five years will be fascinating. Some companies will adapt, others will reinvent themselves and many will fade away as they cling to a declining business model.

Despite the personal computer industry only being 30 years old, it’s already in decline which is something older industries should ponder upon.

This wouldn’t be good news for Microsoft as their struggle to retain their almost monopoly position in corporate desktop applications and will undoubtedly mean reducing licensing fees and accepting tighter margins on their products.

BBVA’s move is interesting on a number of fronts although there’s a few myths among the trend towards cloud computing services and office productivity.

Cost saving myth

Part of the focus of selling these products is on cost and the head of Google Enterprise apps in Europe, Sebastien Marotte, said that his corporate customers on average achieved cost savings of between 50% and 70%.

The cost aspect is interesting, I’ve posted before about exaggerated claims for cloud computing savings, and Marotte’s statement deserves a closer look.

It’s highly likely the claimed cost savings are based on licensing – the standard Google Apps cost of $50 per user per year is substantially less than even the discounted rates large corporations receive on Microsoft licenses.

While the licensing cost is a serious line item, particularly when you have 110,000 employees, it isn’t the whole story; there’s training, maintenance, disaster recovery, security and a whole range of other issues.

Cloud computing services address a lot of those costs, but nothing like the order of 50 to 70%. In fact, it would be hard to find an enterprise that had the sort of slack in its IT operations to achieve those sort of savings.

In one respect, this is where its disappointing that cloud computing vendors tout those sort of savings – not only does it commoditise their industry but it perpetuates the myth amongst executives that IT staff spend the bulk of their time playing video games.

While there are real savings to be made for businesses switching to cloud computing, any sales person claiming a 50% or greater saving should be asked to justify their claims or shown the door.

Clean slate

Another interesting point with BBVA switching to Google is how the bank wants employees to leave all their old email and data in their old systems. Carmen Herranz, BBVA’s director of innovation, says we “want to start from scratch… don’t want to carry across old behaviours”.

Not migrating data is an interesting move and how BBVA’s users deal with retrieving their contact lists, dealing with existing email conversations and how staff will deal with feature differences like document revision tracking – an area where Microsoft Office outdoes Google Docs.

Internal use only

BBVA are only applying the Google services to internal documents as well which means the bank will be using other software – probably Microsoft Office – for corresponding externally.

This makes it even more unlikely the touted cost savings of 50 to 70% are achievable, and may actually increase support costs while reducing productivity as many customer facing staff will have to deal with two systems.

Having one system for use inside the business and another for external communications seems to be a European trend – before Christmas French company Atos announced it was abolishing email within the company but still using it for outside messages.

Both abolishing email and moving to cloud based office packages are really about improving productivity in a business while cost savings are nice, the main focus on adopting cloud computing – or any other new technology – should be on freeing your staff to do more productive work.

When you visit a website your browser reports, among other things, what type of system you’re using. Net Applications – a US based web monitoring company who analyse online browsing statistics – keep a regularly updated list of what people are using when surfing the net.

On their latest statistics, Windows XP finally fell below 50% in September 2011, just on ten years after it was released. Windows 7 is taking over from XP while Apple steadily gain market share.

These statistics show how the operating system has become irrelevant, only really dedicated geeks really care anymore about their version of Windows or whether a computer is running an Apple Mac or Microsoft product.

As most computer users are drifting to cloud computing services and consumers are increasingly using their PCs to access online games and social media sites, it doesn’t really matter anymore what systems are used as long as they work.

For many in the computer industry, this is a problem as they desperately want to sell a product in a market that has become commoditised. It’s another example of the PC industry’s broken business model.

It’s not just the computer industry with this problem, the 3D TV hype of 2010 was a desperate attempt to sell new television sets in a market that had stalled; recession hit consumers had no desire to replace their perfectly good TVs that were less than a decade old, just like Windows XP users.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show that launches in Las Vegas this week will see similar desperation as the various PC and mobile phone manufacturers trying to generate excitement about their new products.

For the journalists and PR folk at the CES the problem is customers largely don’t care anymore. As the failure of 3D TV illustrates, consumers aren’t buying the hype.

Just as with operating systems, most customers want something that works, if you’re going to get them to replace older proven technology you’ll have to show where the new product adds value.

The era of products flying off the shelves because they are new and shiny is over – just ask Microsoft about it’s operating systems.

I was shopping for a cheap netbook for the kids, each of which had been saving up to buy one as they are sick of me yelling at them for playing Minecraft on my work system, and the consensus from the store staff was to do everything to steer folk away from the cheap systems.

This is understandable as most electronic store staff are on commissions, and these are lean on cheap computers. It’s much better to sell a thousand dollar unit – with upgraded warranties and accessories – than a low margin, one off unit.

For manufacturers, similar problems exists; these cheap unit cannibilised their higher priced products with better margins. Dell recently announced they are getting out the netbook market and others are following.

Netbooks themselves are in trouble as the market they addressed for cheap, portable, Internet connected devices is now largely covered by smart phones and tablets which offer better battery life and usability.

Interestingly, the battery life argument was even used by the computer store salesfolk who pointed out – correctly – that the newer laptops have better power management than their cheaper netbook cousins.

While the netbook as a category is dead; the concept itself isn’t. As the uptake of tablet computers like the iPad show, Internet connected portable devices are becoming the computer of choice for many people and the advantages of a laptop form factor; a proper tactile keyboard, USB ports and other external connectors are still attractive.

Probably the worse thing for the manufacturers and retailers is the price points are now established in customers’ minds – $400 is what people want to pay for laptops, which doesn’t bode well for those higher priced systems.

Those manufacturers can’t even get into the tablet computer market as Apple now own that sector that the PC vendors and Microsoft squandered a decade’s lead with substandard equipment and badly designed software.

Despite the best efforts of the electronic store’s salesfolk, my kids ended up buying cheap, low specced netbooks out of their savings and those systems run Minecraft quite nicely. Which is another problem for shops and manufacturers stuck with a 1990s business model.

Christmas is a great time for presents and computer and other tech equipment are great gifts.

But technology being what it is, doesn’t always work as it should. Here’s a quick Christmas check list to help avoid letting technology ruin your Christmas;

1. Read the box before opening

Is it compatible with your system? If you have an older Windows or Mac computer the device might not work with your computer. Similarly if your hard drive or memory doesn’t have the capacity required, the whole process might be a struggle.

2. Update your system
Before plugging in new equipment make sure any computers have had the latest security updates and virus definitions installed. Sometimes brand new equipment does come from the shop with nasties installed.

3. Backup anything important
While most of the time things will seamlessly, it’s worthwhile backing up anything important on your computer before installing new equipment.

4. Are all the parts included?

Does it appear to have been opened or used previously? If parts are missing or there’s signs someone else has used the product, you might have been sold something that was previously returned. If so, it’s best to take it back to the store rather than struggling with a possibly defective product.

5. Take your time

It’s Christmas! Chill out and relax, take your time have a mince pie. Don’t rush to set things up, just take it easy. Doing things too fast means you make mistakes.

6. Be careful opening the box

Manufacturers make it very difficult to open boxes; this is not entirely an accident. It’s also common with tech stuff to have little components and gizmos which are easily lost in the box. So be careful removing all the packaging and keep it to one side.

7. Read the manual!

Once again, it’s time for another mince pie while you read the manual. In there you will find all sorts of useful information. Including how not to mess up your system. Usually, you’ll also find a description of the parts in the box, check you haven’t left something small but critical in the box.

8. Eliminate the obvious

Sometimes something simple is wrong, it could something as basic as a disk or plug is in the wrong way. Take it easy and relax.

9. Don’t panic

If things don’t work, relax and have another mince pie. It’s often something simple. Don’t do anything drastic, if you’ve had a few drinks or it’s getting late, leave it for tomorrow morning.

10. Relax

If it doesn’t work, don’t worry. You can return it or call a tech later.

Remember Christmas is a time for sharing and relaxing. Don’t let your computers and technology upset your holiday.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

The holiday season is here and for many it’s time for a much needed break. Before doing so it’s worthwhile taking a few precautions with your computers and other electronic equipment.

While most of us are moving our data to the cloud, there may still be some data that remains on your office systems. Bear in mind that if your router is damaged or desktop computer has gone missing, you won’t be able to access the web.

And even though your systems will spend much of the next fortnight turned off there are still risks such as power surges, fire and theft etc. There’s even the risk of a virus creeping in when you turn things on when you return. So here’s some things to consider before you leave.

Reset passwords

The New Year is a good time to refresh passwords, so review what your key login details are and update them to stronger, more secure phrases. I personally like using phrases like a song or poem and dropping characters into the spaces so a password might look like: Mary$had$a$little$lamb

You can make the passwords stronger by adding numbers and capitals as well.

Staff turnover happens in all businesses and you may have forgotten to remove some former employees from your accounts when they left. The end of the year is a good time to review who has access to your cloud and remote access accounts.

If you’re a social media user it’s also worthwhile checking what applications you’ve allowed to access your Facebook, Twitter or other online services. That mafia or farm game looks harmless, but often you’ve given it the right to post things and collect data from your account, so take off the ones you no longer find useful.

Unplug everything

Even when turned off, most modern computer equipment still has power running through its systems. This puts technology at risk during storms or brownouts. Printers, modems, routers, should all be turned off and disconnected from power and communications lines.

Network, telephone line or cable connections should be unplugged – power surges can often affect phone and cable network connections. In fact you should unplug anything that connects your equipment to the outside world.

Hide your equipment

Give thieves as little temptation as possible. Electronic equipment has a high resale value and is easily moved. Lock away anything portable and draw the curtains or blinds in rooms where less portable equipment is kept.

If you have an old laptop or mobile phone sitting around it’s not a bad idea to hide away the modern equipment and leave the old stuff in an obvious location. This is a variation on the old “leave ten dollars in the cash draw” ploy that gives thieves something without them ransacking the place. Don’t leave the sacrificial laptop in plain sight or you’ll be inviting break-ins.

Backup

One of the advantages with cloud computing is that many of your backup needs are taken care of. Unfortunately you still need your own local backups.

In most offices not everything gets saved to the cloud and that information matters. For many small business years of work is sitting on the hard drive.

External hard drives and DVDs are the most popular ways of saving backups. Your backup should include documents, email, address books, favorites and bookmarks.

Store the backups away from the computer, preferably offsite. I recommend making two copies, leave one onsite for easy access and store one elsewhere. If something terrible happens to your home or office while you are away, your data is at least safe.

For home offices, it’s a good idea to leave a copy of the backup with your neighbours or a relative in a nearby suburb. An old client of mine swaps external hard drives with his mother- in-law at church each week so he has a reasonably up to date copy of his data somewhere he knows he can get to.

When you return

Your computer is the very last thing you should turn on. Turn on modems, printers, external drives and network equipment before your computer. If you have a cable or ADSL Internet connection, give it a few minutes to connect before trying to log on.

Update your system

While you were away new Internet nasties in the form of viruses, Trojan horses and spyware will have come out and there’s a good chance some of them may be waiting in your inbox.

Before checking emails or surfing the net, update your security software and check for any system updates. Don’t do anything on the net until everything is updated.

Christmas and New Year are times when you should relax. There’s nothing worse than returning to find office equipment and valuable data lost. By backing up your systems and taking some precautions you don’t need to feel anxious about your business being up and running quickly when you get back to work.

Enjoy your holidays and let’s all look forward to a great New Year.

A constant in business is that anything that vaguely involves electricity gets flicked to the IT guru – setting up a phone’s speed dial, clearing a jammed photocopier or resetting the office burglar alarm are all things tech support gets called to fix. They breathe a sigh of relief that electric typewriters aren’t around anymore.

In the early of the Internet, it was the techs who were asked to set company web sites – which is like asking your plumber to run a cafe because making coffee involves water.

Of course some IT folk turned out to be good at designing websites – just as some plumbers turn out to be world class baristas – but it’s a gamble finding out.

Today the poor tech support teams in the less proactive organisations find themselves lumbered with the social media duties, something most of them don’t care about and barely understand themselves.

For those businesses, the problem is the corporate social media accounts are now the shopfront along with customer support and, with most journalists using social media, the PR department as well.

If you’re happy with your geeks looking after your media relations, sales and customer support then ask the IT department to look after the website and social media. Otherwise, you might want to take things a bit more seriously.

Right now the Personal Computer market can be roughly split into two camps; those happily running Windows XP who have no need to upgrade and those who are delighted with Windows 7 who have no need to upgrade.

Short of their computers breaking down, neither group have any good reasons to change to the new operating system as, unlike Windows 3.1, 95 or XP, there is no new technology breakthrough or advance to warrant making the jump.

To make things worse for the PC manufacturers the rise of cloud computing services extends the life of older Windows XP systems and eliminates the biggest driver of new computer purchases in businesses – the software upgrade.

During the PC era one of the banes of business owners were enforced software upgrades where vendors would release a new version of a program every year or two and withdraw support for the older editions.

Frequently the newer software would require the latest hardware, forcing the business into an expensive and disruptive upgrade of all their IT systems.

Today, software companies following the forced upgrade model are finding customers have viable cloud alternatives which destroys the revenue stream behind those frequent releases.

When a customer moves to a cloud service, they also delay buying new desktop or server hardware which is partly driving the steady increase in the age of business computers.

For computer manufacturers the release of Windows 8 could actually be bad news as customers will probably postpone system upgrades until the first service pack of the new operating system is released.

Even if Windows 8 does deliver increased sales as JT Wang hopes, the trend of steadily falling PC prices as smartphones and tablet computers take market share is inevitable.

The PC industry in both laptops and desktops has been a commodity industry for some years and any hope of establishing premium pricing from tablet computers has been dashed by the iPad’s competitive price points.

Regardless of the hopes of the IT industry’s leaders, both the hardware and software sectors are under a lot of stress. It will be interesting to see who adapts to today’s market.

Communities that had never before seen things that were taken for granted in the big cities were easily fooled by miracle treatments that would fix all their ills. By the time the locals discovered the scam, the snake oil salesman and his shills would be well out of town.

Technological change always brings out hype and over the last few decades we’ve seen a similar thing happen with the tech industries, as products and services were sold on the back of claims that could be described as ambitious, if not outrageous.

The Y2K bug was a good example of this as planes were going to fall from the sky and dams collapse if we didn’t hire an expensive consulting firm or buy a widget that would remind our computers they were now in the 21^st Century.

A similar thing is at work with Internet names, where the current push to sell Top Level Domains – a bargain with their $385,000 application fee – is being touted as the fix to everything that is wrong with web addresses.

With digital snake oil it’s interesting how often big organisations sometimes act like 19^th Century American sharecroppers – all too often we seen ministers and CEOs announce an outsourcing deal that will save taxpayers or shareholders millions only to later find the only winner was the consulting firm that sold the idea.

A similar trend is at work in the PR industry, Sky News presenter John Kerrison has an entertaining look on his personal website on how social media is being sold as an easy fix for a business with far more fundamental problems.

The sad thing is that there are real benefits behind the grandiose claims; Y2K was a real problem, money can be saved through intelligent outsourcing and social media is a great PR tool.

Eventually hype backfires, consumers are rightly dubious about anything that has the slightest hint of PR spin while the IT sector is viewed with well-earned suspicion by business proprietors, executives and managers.

A good example of this was last week’s Digital Readiness report from Optus that found businesses aren’t particularly interested in cloud services. This mirrors similar studies by Sensis, MYOB and MelbourneIT which all find organisations aren’t too fussed about the online world in general.

The danger with this is there is fundamental shift happening in society and technologies like websites, social media and cloud computing  – just like the railroads in the 19^th Century – are part of those changes which businesses need to understand.

In an era where snake oil is a commodity there are two challenges for business people; the first is not to be perceived as one of the charlatans and the second is to see the miracle cures for what they are.

Probably the best tool for dealing with the digital snake oil merchants is turn on your own, old-fashioned bullshit detector and treat the shills with the suspicion they deserve.

Last week Frank X. Shaw, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft, pondered the question of whether the Personal Computer era is over

Given the PCs importance to Microsoft’s business it wasn’t surprising that Frank decided it’s not, declaring the personal computer barely middle aged at 30 and ready to take up snowboarding.

Leaving the image of using a Windows Vista equipped laptop as a snowboard aside, the question for many businesses and households is should they buy a personal computer, either as a desktop or portable, in an era where smartphones and tablet computers like the iPad are becoming common? This is even more pronounced given the low cost of ownership for a smartphone or tablet.

The first thing is to consider is can the non-PC devices do what PC can?

For most people the answer is “yes”, particularly given most users are accessing cloud based and social media platforms that run on any web browser. However many prefer to have the options to connect keyboards, printers and scanners, which is expensive and clunky with tablets and smartphones.

While many users could do most of their tasks on a tablet or smart phone, many prefer the utility and expansion options of desktop and portable PCs not to mention using a keyboard and mouse, although the latter points may change as the current generations give way to workers and computer users more used to touch screens as an input device.

The cost of ownership is always a killer and the traditional rule of thumb that the purchase price of computer only represents a third of its cost over the device’s life has become skewed as PC prices have dropped along with other costs like Internet access and expensive printer consumables have increased.

For PCs, the problem is tablets and smartphones have far fewer of the ancillary costs like anti virus software and apps through iTunes, Android or Windows Marketplaces tend to be either free or substantially cheaper than their personal computer counterparts, which skews decisions towards buying a tablet.

Those apps however tend to be far more lightweight than the equivalent PC counterparts and tablets or smartphones don’t have the editing capabilities found on personal computers.

Probably the biggest win for PCs however is that smartphones and tablets are still designed to be tethered to a PC or laptop. While a user can get away with a mobile device that never connects to a computer, they’ll almost be certainly missing out on a lot of the device’s functionality.

So the PC isn’t dead yet, its role in the home and office is evolving and this is recognised by most businesses and consumers as they tend to be buying them to complement desktop and laptop computers.

For Microsoft this is not necessarily good news as the PC sales model is broken.

Until the mid-2000s, most corporate and home users replaced their PCs every five years and this was reflected in Microsoft’s product roadmaps.

The overdue arrival of Microsoft Vista in early 2007 changed this as not only was the product late, it was also bad and customers stayed away.

As a result customers have now learned that they don’t have to upgrade every few years and today nearly half of Microsoft’s customers are still using Windows XP, a ten year old operating system.

So for Microsoft, the good news is the PC is not dead in an era of cloud computing and social media, but making money out of it is becoming harder.