IBM Trailblazer Equates PCs With Typewriters

By Michael Comeau Today marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM (IBM) Personal Computer. On August 12th, 1981, IBM held a press conference at New York City's Waldorf Astoria hotel to unveil the IBM 5150. On that day, $1,565, or about $3,900 in today's dollars, bought you a system unit, keyboard, and a color/graphics capability, whatever that means. Options included a four-color monitor and a printer that could work at a whopping 80 characters-per-second. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. 2011 is a whole different ball game, and one of the designers of the 5150 is comparing today's PC's to typewriters and vinyl records.

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Mark Dean, CTO for IBM Middle East and Africa, is stirring up the web with a blog post entitled, “IBM Leads the Way in Post-PC Era.” Now, if you read through this article, you'll detect two things: 1) The not-so-silent hand of IBM's PR team, as evidenced by unnecessary bragging, and an awkward and vague reference to the company's supposed good deeds in Africa. 2) Everything you need to know about the state of computing. If you've been following my work on Minyanville, then you know that I've been babbling endlessly about how mobile devices like the Apple (AAPL) iPad are disrupting the old-school PC industry.

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Now you can take it from someone that's way, way up the food chain. In fact, Mr. Dean has me looking at the PC in a whole new way -- as a dumb pipe that exists merely so people can access Facebook and Twitter. Here's Mr. Dean's key quote, the one you really need to think about when placing your technology bets going forward:

“These days, it's becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact.”

This one line beats out any 200-page research report from Goldman Sachs (GS). There's arguably only a handful of companies doing serious innovation on the device side, simply because the consumer-electronics industry prefers to copy whatever Apple does. Heck, even my last microwave oven looked like an iMac. So Mr. Dean's right there.

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And look at the other side: who are the companies financially exploiting the “social spaces” that exist between all these devices? It's all relatively new blood -- Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG), Zynga, and Groupon. These companies' services have two very important things in common: 1) They are low-tech and dead-simple to use, thus friendly to non-nerds. 2) They work just fine on cheap computers and phones. This brings us back to the dumb-pipe issue. According to a Nielsen study from 2010, American's top-5 activities in terms of their share of time spent online are as follows:

Social media: 22.7% Online games: 10.2% Email: 8.3% Portals: 4.4% Instant Messaging: 4%

With the exception of the hardcore gaming chunk of the online games category, people's computing activities these days are pretty low-tech. You can do any of these things from just about any computer that can power up.

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