No, mobile computing is NOT killing the desktop PC

GigaOM writer Stacey Higginbotham blogged yesterday that "Mobile Computing Is Killing the Desktop PC." She cataloged the week's grim economic news from the likes of Microsoft, Intel and Nvidia, especially news about cratering desktop PC demand, bright news from Apple and a pinch of industry analysis to conclude that "the era of the desktop PC is quickly coming to an end."

But that's not what's happening. Not exactly. If anything, the "mobile computing" concept itself is likely to be killed off. Let me explain.

You whippersnappers may be too young to recall the year 1990. Back then, the bleeding edge technology was something called "multimedia." The idea that industry analysts had to get their heads around was that PCs would do more than just beep and blip and display text and low-rez images. In the future, PCs would produce sound and video like a home entertainment system might. But by the end of the decade, such capability was cheap and standard. Now you never hear people talk about "multimedia." The multimedia concept is dead and gone, killed by its ubiquity. It's just something PCs do.

More recently, some years ago an exciting new kind of cell phone emerged -- the "camera phone"! Wow! It's a cell phone AND a camera! It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping! The "camera phone" was the future. Now it's the past. You don't hear "camera phone" much anymore, because most phones simply have cameras as a matter of course.

A similar but more interesting process is about to happen with the "mobile computing" concept.

Higginbotham's blog post quotes a report from a company called Technology Business Research (TBR), which suggests that Apple is sitting pretty in part because "TBR believes the combination of a stationary display, keyboard and mouse with a mobile PC is the ideal configuration for many users." Apple makes both laptops and "stationary displays."

But TBR, Higginbotham and many other analysts commenting on the rise of netbooks and notebooks and the decline of PCs are just describing different parts of the elephant in the living room, to mix two elephantine metaphors.

The big picture is that the whole desktop PC/mobile computing dichotomy is dying.

The words and concepts we use are always based on the norm, and the exceptions to that norm. Historically, desktop PCs were the norm, and notebooks were the exceptions.

Now, we've got TBR obsessing over one of the many hybrid or exogenous personal computing models.

We've got desktop PCs, notebooks, netbooks, in-car computers, kitchen-mounted systems, "media center" PCs, computers built into refrigerators, wristwatch PCs, smart phones, and many other models.

The Amazon Kindle downloads books wirelessly, and also surfs the Internet. Sony has a new digital camera that surfs the Internet. TV remote controls have displays on them, and download Internet content. Is all this "computing"?

The fact is that we do and will continue to have all models above, and a few nobody's thought of before.

So is it the end of the desktop PC era? Well, sort of. But it's not the beginning of the mobile computing era.

It's the end of the whole desktop-or-mobile concept, and the beginning of everywhere and anywhere computing.