A Post in Which I Disagree with Steve Jobs (and eventually say something about court technology) August 19, 2011

In IT circles, there’s a lot of discussion about the news that HP has decided to get out of the PC business. Erica Ogg at Gigaom suggests that HP decided that good profits can be made solutions at the back end of computing, but selling computing devices to end users is a business with diminishing margins. Erica’s relates this to a statement made by Steve Jobs that the PC era is over. She cites this quote from Steve Jobs’ announcement:

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.

“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said. “They are still going to be around.” However, he said, only “one out of x people will need them.”

So how does this relate to computers? PCs used to be expensive and had to perform many functions to justify the cost. Now, I can buy an iPad and a good-enough laptop and an ereader and an internet radio for less money than I paid for my computer 10 years ago. I don’t own all those devices because I somehow “evolved,” I own them because they are cheap and convenient to specific tasks.

So in the community of people who build technology for the courts, I argue that this is not the end of the PC era, it’s the beginning of the cheap computing appliance era. We need to be prepared to offer our services to as many end user platforms as possible.

So let me ask you ask you a question: What interaction with courts do you most desire to perform through technology, and what would be your computing appliance of choice?