The conventional wisdom is that the personal computer is moribund.

That “wisdom” is utterly wrong as PC sales are stabilizing and will likely even rise when Microsoft releases Windows 9 in 2015.

Any “dying” product category out there wishes it could sustain unit sales of ~300 million per year.

The much-predicted death of the PC has been an ongoing bogeyman for nearly two decades now, well before tablets became a thing. People have such short memories. (And tablets were a thing before they were a thing. That tablet is running Windows XP!)

Tablets have been the excuse – I don’t think they are the actual reason (more on that in a different post) – for the interface apocalypses of late such as Gnome 3, Unity, and Australis that are extremely user-hostile and are really more about UI/IX designers continuing to receive a paycheck than anything else.

What the world will look like in a decade is that a smaller number of home users will have PCs, businesses will continue using PCs at the same or greater rate, and people will still be predicting the death of the PC.

There’s just no replacement – nor will there be soon – for a big-ass monitor, a mouse or other pointing device with pixel-level control, and no worries about having enough memory or power.

I first started seeing prediction of the imminent death of the PC in 1994. I am sure I will still be seeing these prognostications and pronouncements in 2024, and they’ll still be wrong.