Tablet Shipments Forecast to Top Total PC Shipments in the Fourth Quarter of 2013 and Annually by 2015, According to IDC (IDC press release, 9/11/2013)

It’s the story that would not die! It’s the end of the PC era! It’s the end of Microsoft (which, oblivious, continues to increase revenue at comfortable operating margins, year after year after year)!

It’s …

Not what most industry commentators keep saying, over and over again. What it is:

Two facts:

1. Television shipments are in decline.
2. Tablet shipments aren’t just increasing, but ten or so tablets are sold for every television.

Conclusion: The advent of tablet devices has taken us into the post-television era.

Congratulate me! I’ve achieved perfect incoherence. Impressive, eh?

The PC marketplace is now saturated. Every consumer who wants one has one. Every seat in every business that needs a PC has a PC.

And we’ve just about reached the point where the software people use the most no longer requires more and more RAM and CPU cycles.

Which means the only reasons anyone has to buy a new PC are (1) the old one has worn out; or (2) they’re starting a new business or growing the one they have, and need them for the employees they’re hiring.

We aren’t entering the “post-PC” era. We’re entering the PC-and-a-bunch-of-other-stuff era. Call it the PC-plus era if that’s less of a mouthful. Here are the main pluses and what they mean to you:

VDI: Virtual desktops, the trend that refused to start. Instead of using the storage and processing power that’s sitting right in front of each user, you’re supposed to prefer a bunch of additional servers, more complexity in your networks, and more draw on the limited AC power you’re able to pipe into your data center.

VDI is real, but not general-purpose. It’s fine for production workers whose responsibilities are limited to a fixed set of enterprise applications. You can save a few bucks (but less than you might think) by buying specialized VDI terminals for them, and you will gain a bit of control, so what the heck.

A variant … offline VDI, where each PC image is managed centrally, but is executed locally … would be a terrific possibility for BYOD, if only the user’s device was a Windows tablet that could support it (Android and iOS-based tablets just can’t handle the load). Beyond that? Mostly, you’ll irritate people.

Employee smartphones and tablets: Business travel is annoying, as anyone who does a lot of it can explain in much more detail than anyone else wants to hear. The last thing you need to do is make it more annoying by forcing travelers to haul two laptops along — the one IT provides for business use, which is already an annoyance, plus their personal laptop to handle personal business, which doesn’t go away just because they’re traveling.

IT can make a lot of friends by providing smartphone apps that provide secure access to basic functionality for enterprise applications, plus a VDI client for tablets that allows travelers who don’t need to do a lot of computer work do what they do need to do on a tablet.

Consumer PCs, smartphones and tablets: This is what will hurt the most. Consumers will continue to use PCs to interact with your company’s website. Nothing you’re doing now will go away.

Meanwhile, a lot of them will also want to use the functionality you provide through your website on their smartphones. Casual customers (and “customers” who don’t buy from you but do want your content) will be happy to use their phone’s browser … often, they won’t even care if you don’t provide a specialized version of your website built for the smartphone’s small screen.

But regular customers will want an app for that … not only because an app’s user interface is designed from the ground up to be useful on their smartphone, but because the whole experience is smoother. Make that two apps — one for iOS, the other for Android. And you never know … if Microsoft is able to sell Lumias in any quantity, you might have to make it three.

Then you’ll need another set of apps designed for the tablet’s form factor.

Oh … and you probably won’t get to add any staff to handle all of this additional responsibility.

What can you do about it?

Oops. Sorry … we’re out of space. Stay tuned for next week’s episode of All Things Considered I think I’ll Take Up Organic Farming.

* * *

Full disclosure: My employer, Dell, sells lots of products and services connected to this week’s topic. None of the folks who are responsible have asked my opinion, though. In the interest of symmetry I haven’t asked them for theirs, either.

Reading Windows 8 commentaries from my trade press colleagues is a lot like going to a movie and then reading the review in the next morning’s newspaper. I thought I’d enjoyed it … now I’m not so sure.

Continuing from last week, where, you’ll recall, the subject was that many employees would prefer Windows 8 tablets to their iPad and Android alternatives …

Windows 8 tablets have two killer apps for which there are no competitors on the iPad or Android. You might have heard of them. They’re called Excel and PowerPoint.

Word too, but I’ve given up arguing. I keep hearing that most users only care about text entry, bold, and italics. I don’t believe it, but if that’s all your users care about, and all the documents they receive to read make use of too, go ahead and give ’em Google Apps or Pages or QuickOffice or what-have-you. Or, better, give them better training so they make better use of the tool.

But Excel? Numbers-oriented travelers snort at the spreadsheets available for the iPad. They want real Excel, because serious numbers-oriented travelers need what real Excel has to offer. They use lots of its features. They don’t want to screw around figuring out what got lost when importing an Excel spreadsheet, or how to do what they need to do in the alternatives.

As for PowerPoint: If you travel, you probably use this. If you import a PowerPoint … any PowerPoint that does anything at all beyond displaying bullets and single jpeg images … whatever alternative you import it into will garble the slides. The garbling will range from irritating to I-wish-I-could-see-the-original-so-I-could-figure-out-the-message. But garbled they’ll be.

I guarantee it.

It’s like this: Stylus-enabled OneNote is the sizzle. Excel and PowerPoint are the steak. The user interface? That’s the paper plate they’re served on — good enough, hardly in keeping with the meal, but a really good steak on a paper plate beats something from Sizzler on fine china.

But enough about that. When the topic is Windows 8, tablets probably aren’t the real game. Sure, the sales figures for Windows 8 tablets look terrible. But there’s a difference between trend-spotting and strategy.

As an IT leader, you don’t choose technologies based on sales figures. You choose based on fit-to-function, and, in an age of consumerization and BYOD, on what high-clout business users want.

For the high-clouted, a laptop is standard kit. It’s your baseline spend. Hold that thought.

Now let’s talk about your tablet alternatives. You have two.

The first is a laptop plus a tablet. When at home, in the office, or traveling with laptop the clouted will mostly work on their laptops, using tablets for email (maybe) and entertainment when they don’t want to sit at a desk.

But for some trips they’ll want to leave their laptops behind. When they do, they’ll probably want Windows 8 tablets for the reasons outlined above and last week.

This is how I often travel, adding an external Bluetooth keyboard for when I have to get serious about typing. And for what it’s worth, propping up the tablet at a 30 to 45 degree angle makes the setup quite comfortable.

But alternative #2 is where the Windows 8 vs iOS game will play out, I think, and that’s to equip your laptop-enabled workforce with convertibles … devices that can serve as either a laptop or a tablet.

Yes, they’re spendier than regular laptops, but that’s the wrong comparison.

Remember, your baseline spend is now laptop plus tablet. Compared to what the two together would cost, convertibles start to look quite economical.

And, they cut down the number of gadgets and paraphernalia travelers need to haul around.

But, you now have to choose between a size big enough to be comfortable in laptop mode and small enough to be comfortable as a tablet.

There are always trade-offs. This is a big one in the convertibles space.

Oh … there is one more, and even though it doesn’t matter to you as steward of your company’s information technology portfolio (how’s that for a mouthful o’ buzzwords?) it does matter to you as someone who wants the whole program to succeed.

That’s the thoroughly pathetic Windows App Store, which has something like 37 titles available (I might be exaggerating).

Part of the fun of owning an iPad or Android tablet is browsing through their app stores, looking for software that looks entertaining or interesting.

Let me just tell you, that isn’t part of the fun of owning a Windows 8 tablet.

There are always trade-offs.

* * *

Full disclosure: I work for Dell, which is placing some of its bets in the convertibles space. But they didn’t ask me before doing so, and I didn’t ask them before forming the opinions expressed here.