Courtesy of Vitaliy Katsenelson.
When Hewlett-Packard Co. is discussed in the media, it is portrayed as a PC company. On the surface, that makes sense: HP is the largest PC maker in the world, and personal computers are 30 percent of its revenue. But — and this is a very important but — PCs today represent only 10 percent of HP’s operating profits. Also, despite current conventional wisdom, PCs, unlike IBM Corp.’s mainframes in 1993, are not going away.
A few years ago, when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was asked about his vision for the tablets and PCs of the future, he said they reminded him of cars and trucks: We need both, but there are more cars on the road than trucks. Steve was right, but success or failure will come down to how big the total market for personal devices (irrespective of form factor) will be and what the mix between PCs/notebooks and tablets will be.
The tablet is a terrific tool for consuming information — reading e-mail, watching movies, communicating on Skype, playing games — but its form factor limits it as an effective productivity device. Large screens, a mouse, high computing power, multitasking and multiple windows open at once are the features for which we’ll still need PCs.
