UPDATED 13:57 EST / APRIL 01 2013

The PC Ain’t Dead Yet : A Rebuttal to Weiss’ Blog

SiliconAngle’s founding Editor Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins sat with Kristin Feledy on this morning’s NewsDesk show with his Breaking Analysis on Scott Weiss’ recent blog post called “The Building is the New Server.” In a nutshell, Weiss’ polemical critique speaks of the death of PCs and how an entire ecosystem dies with it.

Hopkins does not agree with Weiss for the most part, and said that the PC is not dead yet. While there is an increase in SaaS, we still use a lot of the same applications that we knew are for PCs, such as gaming, image editing, and video editing.

“I don’t agree with everything that Weiss says. What he is correct on is that there is this software revolution in the server business and in the consumer computing business,” says Hopkins. First of all, for consumer applications, a large amount of our usage is shifting to software service. That much we can all agree on..”

However, “he’s not just talking about desktop computing, he’s talking about the death of everything computing as we know it and not just locally-ran applications which is a fairly large ecosystem itself,” said Mark. “He also claims that an entire chipset architecture will die along with it, as well as the companies that thrive out of that chipset architectures starting from Intel, as well as Dell and HP and Lenovo …

“I could have gone along with that but saying that Rackspace, Amazon, and other cloud service provider. Azure, are going to run everything; that all these software-run service is the future, is a questionable assertion. But even more questionable is the fact that that these large data centers will run no equipment from Dell and HP and other PC manufacturers that have a hand in the server business.”

Other bloggers including Stowe Boyd and MG Siegler drew their own conclusions from Weiss’ blog post, saying that companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Dell, and HP should leave the server business immediately. That, Mark doesn’t agree with either.

“IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP are responding to the market, it’s not like they’re being blind-sided by this. This is a gradual shift over time because enterprise does not move on overnight, like the consumer market can,” says Hopkins.

“Yes, there’s disruption in the enterprise market, but it’s like turning a battleship to get a company like Walmart to shift to software as service overnight. It’s not gonna happen right? It’s gonna take time to shift all these users over so it takes time for these giants to respond. And what they’ve done is they are catching strategy that we here at SiliconAngle call software-led infrastructure and that allows them to tailor their hardware solutions to being more amenable to change when there’s change in software that runs on top of them. There’s a lot more [to that], but that’s the gist of the software-led infrastructure [trend].”


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