Kevin Werbach writes about the emergence of the post-PC era, making the following points:
What comes after the PC isn’t the Internet appliance, or the interactive TV, or the smart phone — it’s all those things and more.
The market is no longer about putting a PC on everyone’s desk, or about connecting that PC to the Net, or about wiring up corporate systems, or about giving people tools like email and Web browsers. Been there, done that.
Apple is becoming a post-PC company…Apple is becoming something much closer to Sony: an integrated digital media company. Sony sells computers, but no one would call Sony a PC company. What it does best is create unique platforms and experiences, then market the hell out of them. That describes the new Apple as well. The heart of the company is the digital lifestyle, not a box.
Apple, especially under Steve Jobs, has a genius for user experience and promotion. In a post-PC or post-technology world, those are two essential skills.
Enterprise technology is moving into a new phase. Bigger, faster, and more feature-laden are no longer selling points in the same way. Smarter, simpler, more efficient, and more flexible are the new criteria. It’s much harder to make powerful system simple than to make them complex.
Kevin is absolutely right, but his context is the developed and present PC markets. There is a world beyond the 500 million PC users and the majority of the 1 billion cellphone users of today – this “invisible” that exists in the world’s emerging markets, a market of 4 billion people. This is a world of limited accessibility to PCs, Internet, emails and enterprise software. The challenge is how to bring these people and markets to the PC and Internet era. These next markets comprise people and enterprises in the world’s developing markets. The Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Dell for these markets still do not exist. This is what our focus in Emergic is.
