The Fall of Wintel and the Rise of Armdroid

by James Allworth  |
Many people are complaining that this year's Consumer Electronics Show was a bore, but blogger Horace Dediu has a much more interesting spin on it.

This year's show, Dediu argues, marks the end of the PC-era: it's finally being disrupted. The basic concept of disruption is that a low-end offering (in this case, tablets) emerges to displace existing solution (PCs). The reason this takes place is that the current solution has improved to such an extent that it provides more performance than a majority of users able to usefully employ.

This means that the iPad and its many clones were not really the main story of the show. The main story — which almost nobody covered — was that this year's CES marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Intel.
This transition has been a long time coming in the PC industry. Ironically enough, both of these two big players have seen the writing on the wall for almost a decade. But as is so often the case, incumbents find it immensely hard to disrupt themselves.

 http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/01/the_fall_of_wintel_and_the_ris.html