Microsoft: PC middle-aged and about to take up snowboarding

If you think that rapidly falling sales of personal computers, and the decision of the biggest PC manufacturer to get out of the market are evidence of the ‘Post-PC’ era that Steve Jobs first talked about last year, you’d be wrong. So says Microsoft corporate communications chief, Frank X Shaw.

Writing on The Official Microsoft Blog, Shaw claimed that, far from being on its deathbed, the PC ‘isn’t even middle aged yet, and [is] about to take up snowboarding.’

Shaw described the devices that many consumers are now buying instead of PCs as complementary rather than competitive. ‘These devices: eReaders, Tablets, Smartphones, Set top boxes, aren’t PC killers, but instead are complementary devices. They are each highly optimized to do a great job on a subset of things any PC can also do.’

Citing two examples, creating and collaboration, Shaw explained that the PC was better at some tasks than other devices and that it would become better still.

Shaw’s post seems to ignore the fact that no-one, least of all Jobs, expects mobile devices to replace the PC for everything. It also fails to recognise that those devices are increasingly becoming more independent of the PC, as shown by Apple’s implementation of iOS syncing over-the-air in iOS 5. And, crucially, it doesn’t acknowledge that many devices, particularly the iPad, are increasingly being used to create, rather than just consume, content.

Far from sticking it’s head in the sand and hoping PC sales reverse the recent downward trend, however, Shaw says Microsoft is ready for the challenges of the next few years: ‘At Microsoft, we envision a future where increasingly powerful devices of all kinds will connect with cloud services to make it all the more easier for us social beings to create, communicate, collaborate and consume information.’

You might think that’s less of a vision and more a statement of the bleeding’ obvious.

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