Windows 10, PCs, and the Future of Apps (Premium)

This Spring, Microsoft will make its upteenth attempt to get developers excited about Windows 10 at Build 2017. But as users have discovered, the apps platform in Windows 10 isn't in any way enticing. And that's just fine.

Pity poor Microsoft: It just hasn't been able to get developers to adopt a major apps platform since the slow-motion Longhorn train wreck of the early 2000s. In Longhorn's wake, mobile and web usage have exploded, leaving Microsoft and its traditional personal computing platform behind. And you know what? I think that's great.

It's great because Microsoft's real future is the cloud anyway, and as the most prestigious provider of productivity solutions in the world, it has a rich opportunity to take advantage of other, more popular mobile platforms.

But it's great for us as well.

With mobile devices, especially smartphones, assuming the mainstream role in the personal computing market, PCs have, in turn, become more vertical devices that are focused on specific productivity scenarios.

Today, there are entire categories of tasks that most people no longer perform on the PC, including reading and browsing, enjoying video content, social networking, light gaming, and much more. But increasingly there are other light productivity tasks---email, document editing, messaging and other communications, and so on---that are likewise done more often on devices, and less so on PCs.

We tend to beat this metaphor to death, but it's apt: Mobile devices have become the cars, as Steve Jobs noted, and PCs are now trucks. Yes, this means that most people don't actually need a PC anymore, or just need one rarely. But it also means that, for those people who do need them, PCs---like trucks---are just as valuable as ever.

That point is often lost in any discussion about the decline of the PC, of course. Because a headline noting the "death" of the PC is a lot more dramatic than a nuanced story about our transitioning usage patterns.

But I have long believed in the "best tool for the job" philosophy. And while one might be able to perform all of their personal computing tasks on a single device, I find it both freeing and more productive to use the different devices for different tasks.

Our workflows are all different, of course. But I use a real PC to get real work done. This regularly includes writing, of course, note-taking (often while on a Skype call), but also research and information gathering (in the form of web browsing), email, scheduling (including such things as booking flights or trains, tasks I would never complete on a mobile device), graphics and photo editing, podcasting, posting to this website, and publishing book updates. And then there are the tasks I perform less frequently: Video editing, DVD/CD "ripping," OS testing in virtual machines, and so on.

That's a lot of stuff. And while much of it could be done on a modern hybrid device---a Chromebook that can also run Android apps, perhaps, or an ...

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