How the Tablet Made an Ass of the PC

John Kirk, writing for Techpinions:

Suspend belief for a moment and imagine that the PC is an Elephant and that the Tablet is an Ass. (That wasn’t so hard, now was it?) Imagine further that you lived in a land where the only pack animals were Elephants.

If you only have one tool, then that is the tool that you will use for most every task. If you only have one pack animal, i.e., the Elephant, then that is the pack animal that you will use for most every task. (Similarly, if you only have one type of computer, i.e., the PC, then that is the computer that you will use for most every computing task.)

It’s exactly like the command-line vs. GUI arguments from the late ’80s and early ’90s. People today forget that that was a thing. But I remember when just about every single thread on Usenet — not just on tech groups, but on any group: sports, movies, politics, whatever — eventually devolved into an argument about whether GUIs were a fad and/or just for dummies who couldn’t figure out how to drive a computer using DOS or a UNIX shell.

Post-PC devices have already secured victory. It’s just a matter of waiting for the endgame to run its course. And then we’ll collectively forget the argument ever happened.

★ Friday, 14 March 2014