Every time the "PC is dead" topic comes up, an old Monty Python movie comes to mind, and I'll bet you can guess which one. PCs are on almost every desk, and the installed base is measured not in the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands -- it is measured in the hundred millions.
Brian Krzanich, Intel's latest CEO, last week announced a massive layoff tied to the company's missing its quarterly numbers, and once again the alarm sounded. Was the PC is dead, or was Intel's miss just another new-CEO mistake? (There have been a lot of those of late.)
It is becoming really clear to me that there definitely needs to be a class for new CEOs that covers the fundamentals -- at least -- but what I'm finding incredibly annoying is that the industry responsible for analytics and artificial intelligence doesn't seem to be very good at doing causal analysis.
I don't think the PC is dead today any more than I did six months ago, but I am becoming concerned that a lot of folks who depend on the PC appear to be doing a damn good job trying to kill it, because they simply don't want do what needs to be done.
By the way, as a side note, I'm suddenly seeing a ton of interest in AMD's coming Zen platform, making Krzanich AMD's favorite Intel CEO ever.
I'll go further into that and then conclude with my product of the week: an interesting new Chromebook from Acer that aggressively uses Gorilla Glass to create something unique and interesting.

The Revolving Door of Causes

Over the last few years, I've watched people point to Windows Vista, the iPad and Windows 8 as the cause of PC sales declines. Windows Vista was replaced by Windows 7, and it didn't really fix the problem. Tablet sales are declining faster than PC sales are declining, and Windows 8 has been replaced by Windows 10, and that didn't fix the problem. Windows 7 and Windows 10 both were well received. So let me suggest that all of these supposed causes are BS.
Think about it. If you are sick and your doctor says the cause is gluten and you cut out gluten but are still sick, and then your doctor says it is sugar so you cut out sugar and are still sick, and then your doctor says it is processed meat and you quit eating that but are still sick -- then maybe it is time for a new doctor who can do more than make random guesses as to what the problem is.
So why is the PC in decline?

Why PC Sales Are in Decline

When the Windows/DOS PC first came to market, it cost a lot and people tended to keep it for around eight years. Then there was a huge push to massively reduce its cost, coupled with a critical need for more performance, and for about a decade we had both rapid market expansion and rapid churn -- even though it was incredibly painful to move from an old PC to a new PC.
The only company that understood that the pain was stupid was Apple. Windows users were trained to accept that getting a new PC was a pain in the butt rather than fun, and they treated it like something to be avoided. Even in companies like Intel, which builds this stuff, it wasn't at all for uncommon employees to turn down a new PC, because they simply didn't have the time to deal with the pain of the migration. That was drilled in over and over again.
Once Windows XP came out, people were sick of getting new PCs, and the developed market started to reach saturation. That meant not only that there were there fewer people who didn't have PCs, but also that there was an increasing number of folks who didn't want to replace the ones they had.
Oh, and even though migrations got a lot easier after Windows Vista, a huge part of the market was stuck on Windows XP.
So I think the heart of the problem is that for a decade, the PC industry taught people to avoid new PCs like the plague, and it did a great job saturating the market, which is why PCs are stalled.
What's my proof point? If you look at the latest Gartner and IDC numbers, you'll see that the stats for Apple and Dell are nearly identical and flat, which suggests a stable-state replacement market. Given that XP stabilized in the market around 2005 and the numbers reflect 2015, we are now operating in a saturated market in which the replacement cycle is averaging eight to 10 years.
I should point out that this is pretty close to where the TV market was at the beginning of the last decade -- a saturated market with an eight-to-10 year replacement cycle.