The PC Platform Is Stronger Than Ever

That clamoring grew even louder when reports came in that sales of processors for PCs unexpectedly slumped earlier this year. The iPad's success has skyrocketed in part because of its insanely long battery life, ultralight form factor, multitouch screen capabilities and integration with Apple's iTunes App Store.

But as well received as the iPad has been, it's also served to highlight continued strengths of the industry-standard PC. In fact, management and integration of the iPad is still dependent on either a PC or an Apple Mac. As this magazine was going to press, the market-research firm iSuppli had just reported PC sales in the third quarter grew more than 10 percent over the year-ago quarter.

Rather than a slow death, the PC is now seeing its umpteenth renaissance, and there are five key reasons for this. Here's why you'll be able to take advantage moving into 2011.

1. As noted, new devices like the iPad, as well as the iPhone, are dependent on PCs for easy management, backup of content and data, and more. It's just more practical to dock-and-sync handhelds to PCs-- just as it's been practical to connect a PC to a server. The PC, now more than ever, serves as a powerful, personal command center.

2. This generation of processors hasn't gotten the Hollywood treatment we've seen from earlier generations like the Pentium or (don't laugh) Itanium. However, the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 now provide enough compute power to run video rendering, computer-assisted design (CAD) applications and VoIP that you once would have had to call Silicon Graphics to get.

3. Flash-memory-based technology has not exactly grown up in a flash, but it has officially come of age over the past 12 months. That has led to major increases in the breadth and depth of solid state drive technology--with greater pricing, capacity and sourcing options than ever. Even better, it has led to manufacturers of hard disk drives becoming more competitive than ever. A terabyte internal hard drive can now be had for less than $40; 2 TB can be had for less than $100. 4. With major increases in price performance, value is greater than it has ever been. Consider: It's possible to construct a Core i3-based PC with 4 GB of memory, decent storage capacity and support for a half-dozen USB 2.0 devices for less than $500--or about the same as an iPad. That's a major statement for the continued and historic economy of the PC ecosystem.

5. Software and hardware are now in harmony. When major processor manufacturers first launched their quad-core CPUs, the major, new desktop operating system on the market was Windows Vista. (How'd that work out for us?) Now, Windows 7 has become serious enough for corporate adoption to finally gain traction--and the synergy between the processing capability and what Windows 7 enables (from everything from encryption to better multimedia) is hard to resist.

There is great opportunity here. The channel is poised to be able to take full advantage of all of these factors in leading the market to the first, significant PC refresh in almost 10 years and reawaken the market to the stunning potential of the platform.

If we wanted to quibble, we could say that the adoption of multitouch technology on the industry-standard PC is lagging more than we'd like, or that Microsoft needs to pick up its game in competing with Apple's iTunes App store for the minds of great software developers.

But the bottom line is this: The next year will be an interesting one--and likely one of nice growth--for the PC space. And that means opportunity for everyone in the value chain.