Tag: tablet computing

Los Angeles finds the limits on school computers

Los Angeles finds the limits of computers in schools, this might be a good thing for the education tech sector.

Two years ago the Los Angeles school board proudly announced a $1.3 billion project to roll out iPads in some of its more disadvantaged schools.

Now the contract has collapsed and the school board wants the money back from Apple and its partner, education publisher Pearson.

It seems the program’s big problem was the software with Pearson supplying a poor product that was unusable for students.

What we may well be seeing though is the end of the obsession politicians and education bureaucrats have with technology, something that ran ahead of teachers’ skills to use the tools and the capabilities of those tools – as we see with Pearson.

Perversely though this may be the time that education technology starts to flourish as the sector falls into what Gartner describes as the ‘pit of disillusionment.’

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Hurtling into the post PC era

The latest computer sales figures are not good for those businesses who depend up personal computers.

Consulting firm IDC quarterly report on PC shipment figures this quarter shows a stunning 14% drop of global computer sales. On those numbers, the PC era is definately over.

Across the board the figures are horrible with double digit declines across the board. Market leader HP reported PC sales had fallen by nearly a quarter yet they retained their market lead as all of their competitors reported similar falls.

What’s also notable is the PC industry’s ultrabook attempt to wean consumers off cheap nebooks has backfired terrible, as the analysts note;

Fading Mini Notebook shipments have taken a big chunk out of the low-end market while tablets and smartphones continue to divert consumer spending.

Instead of buying higher priced ultabooks, consumers have abandoned portable PCs altogether and gone to smartphones or tablet computers.

The PC manufacturers must be rueing how they let the tablet computer market slip through their fingers during the 2000s.

Failing to ship decent tablet computers is symptomatic of a bigger problem for the PC manufacturers – their inability to innovate.

The PC industry is struggling to identify innovations that differentiate PCs from other products and inspire consumers to buy, and instead is meeting significant resistance to changes perceived as cumbersome or costly.

As IDC point out, even if they do introduce new products, consumers are wary that any “innovation” is going to be cumbersome. Basically the PC manufacturers have lost their customers’ trust.

How this affects Dell’s proposed buy out remains to be seen; it’s hard to see how investors would not be concerns at a 10% fall in sales, although Dell was one of the better performers.

For Microsoft, this news should further accelerate their moving products and customers to their cloud and enterprise products. For their Windows division it looks like there are tough times ahead.

The decline of the PC market is itself a study in product and innovation cycles. It could well be that the personal computer is going the way of the fax machine.

For some businesses that will be tragedy, but the market – and the opportunities – move on.

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Three screens, one screen

Is Blackberry, Apple or Microsoft right about the way we’ll use computers in the future?

One of the points that came out of Blackberry’s Z10 launch last week was CEO Thorsten Heins’ talking about the company’s ‘one screen’ strategy.

Blackberry sees the smartphone as being the centre of people’s computer usage with them replacing personal computers and tablets as the main computing tool.

This is at odds with the rest of the phone and computer industries who are struggling with managing the three or four devices that most people use.

Apple overcame this by having different operating systems – OS X and iOS – and even then the mobile iOS is subtly forked for the different ways people use tablets versus  smartphones.

With Windows 8, Microsoft chose to go the opposite way with an operating system which works on all devices. Sadly it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Blackberry’s strategy is to assume smartphones will be their main communications device. It’s a big bet which doesn’t align with what seems to be experience of most people.

Over the last few years Blackberry’s smartphone market share has collapsed from 40% to 4%, so it’s the time for brave bets although its hard to see that customers will use smartphones instead of PCs or tablets is the right call.

It’s an interesting question though – can you see your smartphone being your main computer?

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