Cloud a Real PC Killer

I reported these finding on Redmondmag.com, another site I write for, and the IT readers went nuts. Here's the skinny. The Gartner Group, more eager for attention than Madonna, recently announced that it believes that by 2014 the PC won't really matter. It will be just another client, no more important than a mobile phone or tablet. And your corporate servers won't mean a damn thing, either. Apps and data will rest comfortably in personal clouds. In fact, you could mix and match these clients depending upon mood or where you are.

Two year's time may seem like a long time if you're working on an associate degree, but not when it comes to enterprise computing. Heck, how many of you are still on XP are even older?

Redmond readers bust a gut laughing. They remembered Gartner predicting OS/2 would kill Windows and that IT would die off as a profession, along with myriad other misfires.

I think Gartner's idea is dopier than an Ahmadinejad UN speech. First, what IT pros in their right minds would let users choose their core devices and where to store their core business data? And just how does one work on a 10,000-cell spreadsheet on a cell phone?

And you want to make a tablet work like a PC? Just add a keyboard and a few other items. Before you know it, it weighs as much as a laptop with half the power.

The cloud is a great thing, but this is the impact it will have in the near term, except for consumer and teenage computing.

What say you? Speak your piece at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 03/27/2012 at 12:47 PM