Re: How many are waiting for Windows 8 to be "retired"? @Steve Knox
Steve, I respectfully disagree.
If you had said 2001 or 2002, the introduction of XP, I would tend to agree.
When the PC was introduced in 1981/1982, they were very clearly business only devices. Even in the US they were too expensive for a home purchase unless driven by a specific need, and this was even more the case outside of the US where a basic PC at introduction equated to about half of my yearly salary as it was at the time.
I would say that the whole area of media consumption is completely new from that time. You could not eve use a PC (and here I am talking about an IBM compatible PC) to play music off any domestic media available at the time, and that is the easiest media (unless you count books, which wern't distributed to be read on PCs).
The home market was better served in the US by Apple, Commodore and Atari kit, and by the plethora of UK manufacturers including Acorn, Sinclair etc in the UK, and Japanese companies for the rest of the world in the early '80s, and I would say that you cannot claim that a modern PC has anything more than a passing relationship to any of these devices.
It took until the mid '90s for the PC to become an attractive home purchase. I bought my first IBM compatible at that time (I was a committed BBC Micro user), for about £1000, and it came with a 100MHz Pentium, 16GB of memory, a 1.2GB hard disk, a CD Reader, an ATI Mach64 display adapter with 14" monitor providing 256 colour 800x600 resolution SVGA display, and a sound-blaster compatible sound card, running Windows 95 (and Linux - although this was a real effort getting it to work). This could be counted as a 'multimedia PC', and whilst you could listen to a CD, you would not (and probably could not) watch a film on it with any degree of enjoyment.
And to bring it back to the point, the majority of modern PCs in the home are used as media consumption and social media devices, which a tablet, chromebook or convertable will do as well or better than a PC. PCs (especially desktop PCs) will become niche devices for people who have a need for more storage or processing power than a low-power device can provide.
In business, PCs are mostly an alternative to form-filling, paperwork and performing data-lookups, and I suspect we will see PCs being displaced by thin clients based around the same technologies as a tablet-with-a-keyboard or small laptop (yes, really this time) because of the efficiencies in the administration and cost savings of large numbers of such devices.
A thin client deployed on top of Android on an Arm device, built into the screen (effectively a tablet), with a keyboard and pointing device, and limited amounts of local storage, connected to a server estate using a remote desktop technology or cloud service will be a very desireable device for many businesses, and probably cheaper than an equivalent environment built around desktop PCs. Deploy a secured WiFi, and you don't even need to cable the desks for data!
I can see devices like this retailing for around £100 per desk in volume, plus some extra for the backend services, in the near future. All we need are the applications, and I'm pretty sure that OpenStack or Azure, deployed either as a local or remote cloud will get sufficuent traction for serious software to appear and displace PC software.
It's all a bit bleak for the PC market, quite honestly.
Bloody hell. I've just argued myself into thinking seriously about SaaS cloud services! Maybe it's not all BS!