The Virtual Transformation

In August 1995 when Microsoft launched Windows 95 in an attempt to capture their founder's audacious dream of having a computer running Windows on every desktop in the world. But in a world with an insatiable appetite for communication the vision statements have dramatically changed. Everyone is leaving their desktops behind and moving into the cloud and soon reaching for the stars. In an increasingly mobile world instant gratification is top order.

Bye bye PCs

Three global behemoths, Apple, Google and Microsoft are locked in a battle for supremacy, and there are the outliers, Amazon and RIM. One a bold maverick and the latter was once a visionary in the enterprise world, now fast disappearing into the background . While Microsoft still maintains a stranglehold on the PC marketshare Google and Apple have gone mobile and flipped the game on Microsoft. Over the last few years PC sales has diminished, as we speak there are more smart mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) sold than PCs. IBM sold their, once priced PC business to the Chinese firm Lenovo. HP is struggling to hive off it's PC business, in an attempt to move into high value solutions and services. This is a testament to the fact that the era of the PC will soon be behind us. This is made possible through increasingly shrinking chipsets and cloud based services. While device footprint are increasingly portable, we are witnessing convergence, now no one carries an mp3 player, phone, and a camera, they just carry their smart phone instead.

Devices to services

In a fast evolving world and market place nobody has the time to marvel at product spec sheets, everybody is interested in the end service. In other words, what's in it for me? Hardware manufacturers no longer just publish technical specifications, instead feature apps and their services. So what sells now is Nokia's navigation services, Amazon Kindle's books online, iTunes music or YouTube's video channels and the device is merely a means to an end. This is increasingly driving the cost of the hardware down, as seen with the launch of the Kindle Fire. The device that runs the largest app store indirectly delivers the widest range of services. Apple sits pretty on top with 414,852 apps since its launch in 2007, while Google is fast catching up with 237,199 apps in the last 3 years.