89% of Hulu users and 42% of Netflix users watch shows & movies directly on computer. http://on.mash.to/ov6L51
That’s huge. Mid 2011, pretty much nobody is watching something on a smartphone or a tablet. And if we do the same charts with games, you can be sure that “classic computers” come far in first (just Facebook and Steam, bam) with consoles and tablets at the bottom. Considering the amount of bullshit we have to eat saying that PCs are so dead blabla, it needs to stop.
The computer, the PC, is going to be a central piece of the house as the fridge is today. A simple commodity (that’s why the all Apple hardware business will be in trouble: do you know your fridge brand? Soon nobody will care either with computers, it’s already happening because they’re all “good enough”). People like to have a machine that does it all and the PC is the one doing everything as good as you can. And it is now dead simple.
Different, smaller devices will connect to it but we will definitely have a computer at home that does a lot of things, like we do today but even more and in a perfect way, not with laptops, noisy towers and DVI-to-HDMI converters. We already have so much power, unused today except for some bad games at very high resolutions. Next step is not to make this technological power fit smaller devices but to distribute it over devices and monitors. Benefits will be greater for everybody (no overheating devices with poor battery life for users, easier for engineers, scalable for suppliers). This, is the beginning.
Imagine that each home has a computer box somewhere in a closet with xx cores and xx GPUs, running the TV, games from anywhere, internet and the AC system. Don’t be afraid, we will certainly have ways to make everything independent so that you can fix a part without breaking another. Don’t be afraid to have a computer taking control over your life, it’s already the case in planes. Imagine that each home at night is using its calculation power for distributed computing, warming the house and channeling the heat for the family’s next morning? How fucking cool would that be? That would be super efficient. Imagine that we cure cancer because your house and millions of others helped the process of understanding protein folding? Now that’s true glocal citizenship my friend.
Tablets and at a least extent smarphones are just accessories to our digital life. Like plates forks and knifes, we use them to consume but the food comes from one place, the fridge, the kitchen. The PC. The issues with the Cloud and privacy show that people are going to LOVE having their personal stuff at home, streaming to their devices around the world.
HomeCloud. It’s happening and the PC is the core.