Why did the PC Peak?

We're seeing hyper growth and diversity in computing markets. We've never before witnessed such a wide variety of commercially successful computing platforms.

PCs aren't going away. They're just losing relevance and marketshare. They won't disappear completely. White collar professionals - designers, programmers, analysts, anyone that relies heavily on the Office Suite - won't abandon their PCs anytime soon. 10 years ago, PCs accounted for 95% of computing devices sold. Today, they comprise about 30% of all new computing sales. In 10 years, PCs will be just a small fraction of total computing device sales.

Although PC sales have been shrinking as a percentage of total computing since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, they've continued to grow in absolute terms. But as IDC reported, Q1 2013 saw the worst contraction in the history of the PC market. The PC peaked. 2013 marks the end of the PC era, and the beginning of the post-PC era, characterized by relatively seamless computing across form factors, software platforms, and devices.

There's 1 fundamental reason for a decline in PC demand, derived from Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption: good enough. Good enough manifests in a few different ways.

Firstly, tablets are good enough for most people most of the time. The tablet market's hyperbolic growth speaks to the fact that most consumers prefer touchscreen computing to the keyboard and mouse. Computing markets are still growing quite rapidly: although PCs are on the decline, tablet growth more than compensates. People are computing more than ever before, but they prefer tablets to traditional PCs.

Secondly, PC lifespans are increasing. Although we've seen rapid innovation and iteration in mobile computing over the past few years, desktop computing really hasn't changed in 10 years. As the PC form factor, hardware, and software matured in the early to mid 2000s, PC upgrade cycles slowed. And Windows 7, as the first version of Windows to require fewer computing resources than its predecessor, exacerbated this trend. So has cloud computing. Computing has to be done somewhere; as more of it's done in the cloud, less of it's being done locally. With an increasing amount of computing being done in the cloud, people just don't need to upgrade their devices as frequently as before.

The PC market peaked. We're witnessing the beginning of the decline of the PC. PCs won't go away, but they will be less relevant and prevalent than ever before.

One for All, or All for One?

5 years from now, there will be a sea of "duh, why didn't I think of that?" Google Glass apps. But today, it's hard to know which ideas and products will succeed. It's even harder to forecast how the apps will evolve.

Product strategies at startups vary along a spectrum. Some companies, such as VersaSuite*, try to tackle large, complicated problems. Others, such as AirStrip Technologies**, solve many smaller related problems. Each strategy offers pros and cons. These characterizations don't apply to every business, but tend to characterize businesses at each end of the spectrum.

Pros of solving a big problem:

1. More revenue per user/sale - The more painful the problem, the more people are generally willing to pay for it.

2. Less competition - Because it's a harder problem to solve, there's generally less competition.

3. Larger markets - harder-to-solve problems are usually indicative of larger markets.

Pros of solving smaller problems:

1. No one is irreplaceable - What if the lead engineer at startup solving a really big problem left after 3 months? What if it was an engineer working on one of 1/5 smaller products?

2. Shorter development cycle - Faster commercialization. This expedites time to revenue, time to profit, and creates opportunities to build committed and vocal users to help grow the business. These are some of the most crucial metrics for investors.

3. Higher profit margin per user/sale - more complicated products tend to require more training, setup, and support than simpler ones. Many simple apps - think about most iPhone apps - require absolutely no support or overhead. In some cases, these business print money and cost literally nothing to operate.

4. Less stress and lower costs - smaller problems require fewer employees. Employees are expensive and complicated. It's much easier to manage a company with 10 employees than a company with 100 employees. The lower the cost of doing business, the lower the cost of being wrong.

Google Glass provides marginal value. Most people don't need Glass most of the time. Most Glass apps will be vitamins, not pain pills. In light of the pros and cons presented above, it would make sense that Glass app developers would tend towards the AirStrip model, not the VersaSuite model. There will of course be developers solving big problems on Glass, but most will go after lower hanging fruit.

* VersaSuite develops, markets, sells, deploys, and supports a suite of software modules that collectively provide the software backbone to run all aspects hospital. VersaSuite solves an extremely complicated problem: end-to-end hospital automation. VersaSuite includes over 1000 screens, and generally costs about $1M for smaller hospitals. The software and deployment services are even more expensive at larger organizations.

** Airstrip Technologies was founded in 2010 as an iPhone application that could gather EKG data for cardiologists and display it on an iPhone. AirStrip solved that problem to perfection. There's just not a whole lot of innovation left to be had around displaying and understanding EKG data. In order to continue growing, AirStrip has expended into related markets: displaying ultrasound, vitals, and other diagnostic data for physicians on mobile devices. Over the past 3 years, AirStrip has developed a portfolio of smartphone apps to bring instrument-driven diagnostics to mobile devices. Each is packaged and sold separately.

Glass For [Hobby]

People enjoy talking about Google Glass. Everyone has ideas for it. I've read through hundreds of Glass ideas. I'm taking cues from all of the good ideas, looking for patterns and trends, and trying to understand how the various Glass application markets will evolve.

Unfortunately, economics are not in most developers' favor. Even still, people continue to dream. I've noticed a significant pattern among many ideas: Glass for [hobby].

Glass can enhance the experience of almost any hobby. Modern smartphones are most effective at enhancing the experiences of media and other digitize-able hobbies. But smartphones can't impact real time analog hobbies. Because the smartphone isn't immediately available at all times, it doesn't mesh well with the analog world. But Glass can enhance almost any analog hobby. It's easy to imagine how Glass could improve all of these common hobbies, and many more:

Art production

Basketball training - practicing free throws

Cooking

Driving

Football training - throwing a football

Gambling

Gardening

Golf

Long distance running - race against a ghost of yourself

Public speaking

Video production

Music production

Traveling and tourism

Perhaps with the exceptions of art production and professional athletic training, at $1500 I don't think Glass is a worthwhile investment for hobbyists in any of these fields. Although Glass would enhance all of these hobbies, it's not worth $1500 in any of them.

We'll see a myriad of "Glass for [hobby]" apps. Most of them are rather obvious and quite simple to develop. I don't think many of them can be commercially viable businesses until the hardware cost to the end user is below $300. In the long run, some of these apps will be commercially successful, but in the early days, it will be difficult for most of the "Glass for [hobby]" apps to make any significant sum of money.

My Favorite Mac OSX Apps

Since I just wrote about my favorite iOS apps, I had to do the same thing for Mac OSX apps too.

Before I start, it's important to note that I have super computer - a 15" quad core Retina Macbook Pro with 16 of RAM. I'm blessed to have a computer that handles all of these applications simultaneously. I don't ever close any apps. I'm always running at least 30 apps. Many are background apps like Alfred, but they all contribute to my personal computing efficiency.

Here are the apps that make my day, everyday, 10+ hours a day. Enjoy.

Adium - Adium is a cross platform instant messaging client. It hooks into Facebook, Gchat, and dozens of other messaging services. Unlike most of the other apps on this list, which value simplicity and fewer options, Adium offers hundreds of options. I've never seen a more extensible and flexible chat client. Even still, it's fast and well designed. Most importantly, it integrates Facebook and GChat natively into OSX.

Alfred - exceptional. Alfred lets you "tell" your computer to do anything. It's not "smart" per se like Siri, but it's incredibly fast and effective for personal productivity. I use it on average 40 daily per Alfred's own usage logs. It's so good, I wrote a whole post about it. If you have a Mac, download it, now.

BetterTouchTool (BTT) - exceptional. BTT understands over 50 multitouch gestures on the Mac Trackpad, and can map any gesture to any OS or application specific command. It perfects the trackpad. It's so good, I a whole post about it too. If you have a Mac, download it, now.

Caffeine - Caffeine is really simple. It lives in the menu bar, and prevents the screen from going to sleep. That's it.

Chrome - Chrome is the best web browser hands down. It is the most secure, fastest, most standards-compliant browser on the market with the sleekest UI. It also offers seamless profile sync across all major computing platforms, and has a large developer community that write great extensions. Thank you, Google.

Clear - the best task list manager. It's clean and simple. No dates, no options, no reminders, no settings. Just swipe and done. And of course, it syncs with Clear for iOS, making it a killer productivity app at the desk and on the go.

DashExpander - a very simple text-expansion tool. Type a predefined token, and DashExpander replaces the token with anything else. I have over 50 shortcuts saved, including credit card numbers, email addresses, URLs, passwords, and more. It's a very useful tool. Apparently, it's no longer available for download. I'm not sure why.

Divvy - Divvy is a great window-management utility. I use it every morning after plugging in my 2 external monitors at work. Divvy expedites the process of moving windows around, especially across 3 monitors.

DropBox - DropBox is amazing. I use it for a variety of different reasons. I have DropBox set as my default download folder, meaning that I can download a file and walk out the door and know that the file is immediately available on my iPhone. I use DropBox as a personal FTP server. I use it to sync pictures from my iPhone back to my Mac. It's a fantastic utility in many respects. In 10 years, we will look back at DropBox as one of the defining applications of Post-PC era because it powers cross-device and cross-platform computing.

Evernote - I use Evernote to remember everything across all computing platforms. I sync tons of content to Evernote on a regular basis. I love it.

Fantastical - Fantastical provides the best UI to add calendar appointments on the OSX. After clicking Fantastical in the menu bar, I can just type the event description as a statement. For example, "Dinner with John at Chuy's Thursday at 9." Fantastical uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create calendar appointments on the fly. I don't ever click through date/time pickers, add attendees manually, or set locations via disparate controls. I write a brief statement, and Fantastical does the rest. It's like Siri for making calendar appointments, but without voice-to-text.

iA Writer - I use iA Writer to write and blog. It offers a clean and elegant UI that allows me to get in the zone. Focus is about saying "no", and iA writer understands that. There are no distractions and very few options, settings, or preferences to get in the way.

join.me - The easiest to use screen sharing utility. In one click, join.me begins sharing the screen and generates a unique session number to give to others. 1-2 more clicks to email a link. Simple, easy, awesome, and free.

Kindle - Kindle is the best eBook platform. It has the largest library of books at the best prices, supports all major computing platforms, and offers great digital-only features that enhance the reading experience like dictionary, highlighting and note syncing, X-Ray, etc.

Kod - Kod is just a text editor. It doesn't have many fancy features, but it's lighting fast, and has a UI that's inspired by Chrome. That's all I need from a text editor.

Mail (Apple) - Apple Mail is the best Exchange client I've ever used. It offers a UI that makes it much easier to parse and understand emails than Outlook. The animations are satisfying. The only problem with Mail is that it can temporarily freeze when it tries too aggressively to search through large contact lists. Still, it's better than Outlook for Windows or OSX.

MenuMeters (screenshot below) - I shouldn't use MenuMeters, but I do. It would seem hypocritical of me to talk so much about simplicity in computing, then go out of my way to illuminate all of the technical complexity of computing at all times on my primary work machine. I would really prefer not to use MenuMeters, but I need it. I only use the features that graph CPU usage and real time upload and download rates. The CPU graph highlights which applications are computationally intensive, and the upload/download rates indicate if network connectivity is as fast as I think it should be.

Messages (Apple) - The default messaging solution on all cell phones is still the ancient SMS text. Apple co-opted SMS with iMessage on all iDevices, making it easier to text my friends. Since most of my friends have iDevices, I receive their text messages on my laptop while at work, even though my friends didn't go out of their way to use a non-default messaging service.

Parallels Desktop 8 - Parallels is the best virtual machine to run Windows on OSX. I generally use it all day at work since VersaSuite is a native Windows application and won't run natively on OSX. Although Parallels was less than ideal for all day use a few years ago, today it's a mature application. It's fast, and has all of the features I need to work across OSes all day everyday.

PopClip (screenshot below)- PopClip brings iOS' cut/copy/paste functionality to OSX's mouse. After highlighting any piece of text, PopClip gives a popover with a handful of options, including Google search, cut, copy, paste, and more. It's pretty sleek.

Preview (Apple) - When I worked in Windows, I had to use SnagIt to quickly take screenshots, annotate them with arrows and text and the like. On OSX, I can do that out of the box with OSX's built in screen capture tool and Preview. I use Preview to submit bugs and features enhancements to our developers at work multiples times daily. It's fast and easy to use. Sorry, no link to Preview. Apple doesn't have a webpage for Preview anymore.

Reeder - like on iOS, Reeder for OSX provides the best RSS UI to trudge through and share hundreds of articles on a daily basis. It understands its job, and does it better than any other RSS client I've ever used.

Sparrow - Sparrow is native Gmail on OSX done right. The UI is minimal and fast, and supports all of the Gmail specific functions that I need. It even auto-converts attachments into DropBox links.

Spotify - like on iOS, Spotify offers the music listening experience that Apple should. $10/month to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, on any device that I want. Perfect.

VLC - VLC plays almost any video file ever created. No stupid codec or compatibility issues.

Living at the Crossroads of Technology and the Arts

In Steve Jobs' 2nd to last keynote presentation at the launch of the iPad 2 in March 2011, he outlined what he thought made Apple special. He suggested that technology alone is not enough, and that Apple succeeds because it's at the cross roads of technology and the arts. You can see that particular segment of Jobs' keynote at 1:08:30 (iTunes link) (web link).

I've been writing on a regular basis for just over 3 months now. I'm using www.stickk.com to punish myself if I don't blog 3x weekly. Every week I fail, stickk.com will give $10 to the NRA. I haven't and won't pay them a penny.

Writing was difficult when I first started blogging. I forced myself to write because I just wasn't comfortable writing. A few months later, writing has evolved from a chore into a fun activity that I thoroughly enjoy. And because I enjoy it, I spend much more time thinking about it even when I'm not writing. It's difficult to come up with interesting material within my domain areas of expertise 3x weekly, so I'm always looking for new things to write about. Every conversation, every news headline, every social scenario can spark a blog post idea.

Writing is fun. I hope I never stop. I've also come to understand that writing and programming are remarkably similar in their respective creative processes. This is particularly interesting because writing and programming generally attract opposing personality types.

Perhaps most importantly, both professions value simplicity and clarity. Both believe in the "less is more" philosophy.

Programming 101: less code is better code. The concept of writing fewer lines of code is interwoven through virtually every aspect of computer science. Abstraction, encapsulation, object-oriented programming, and APIs empower developers to write fewer lines code.

Good writing values some of the same concepts as good coding. If a message or idea can be expressed in fewer words, it should. No one wants to read unorganized babble. No developer wants to read spaghetti code*.

Writing varies across many sub domains, including blogging, novels, traditional news media, and many others. Similarly, there are many different sub domains of programming, such as kernel, library-specific, imaging, and database programming, to name a few. Humans have developed a wide range of languages and dialects, each with unique structures, strengths and weaknesses. In the same light, there are many programming languages, each with it's strengths and weaknesses, nuances and quirks, and related languages. Human and machine communications are astonishingly similar.

Good writing and programming require planning and organizing. Programmers define objects and data structures and how they relate to and work with one another, and then code and debug. In writing, authors have to create a plan and outline that will most effectively convey their ideas. They layout out how, when, where, and why people and ideas intersect, just as programmers direct objects and data structures. Once writers develop an outline, they can flesh out the details and add literary style. After they write, writers refine and reiterate. Programmers design, code, test, and debug.

Over the past few years, I've come to appreciate design in the physical world as I've spent more time programming, designing, developing, and selling virtual designs. And now the same thing is happening with writing. The more I write, the more I appreciate how communication and language permeate through daily life, both professionally and personally. I look for well crafted ideas and sentences when I read, seek good writing patterns, and try to put myself in other writers' shoes to understand how and why they wrote what they did.

I've been given the privilege to live in the world of technology since I was born. But I don't want to live there for the rest of my life. As much as I love technology, I don't want to be bounded by it. Too many in the industry get trapped in a technology lifestyle bubble. I want to challenge my beliefs and learn from my mistakes and assumptions. Perhaps James Altucher, one of my favorite bloggers, said it best: "My only New Year’s resolution for 2013 is to dot the landscape of my life once more with question marks instead of periods. To turn judgments into queries. To turn 'this' into 'that?'"

*Spaghetti code is code which cannot be followed or easily understood. Rather than grouping related code segments, spaghetti code groups unrelated functions. This breaks the concept of encapsulation, which in turn creates more code, and decreases the readability for other programmers. Developers hate inheriting spaghetti code.