Having just survived election season, we are all very much attuned to “key indicators” that can help to predict outcomes. Certainly we have seen no lack of these in the press over the past few months, some accurate, some not so much.
In the technology industry, a key indicator that has been monitored for years is the sale of memory chips, as a predictor of future PC sales volume. A recent change in this statistic can be interpreted as an early warning sign of a sea change in the technology marketplace.
For the first time in history, sales of memory chips for mobile devices have eclipsed sales of chips for PCs. This shift suggests that, in the next three or four years, we may well see large-scale displacement of PCs as the “workhorse” of office technology in favor of tablets, smartphones, and other smaller devices. Certainly hardware suppliers, by their ordering behavior, are banking on this trend to accelerate.
Assessing Microsoft’s recent rollout of Windows 8, along with the unveiling of its own tablet strategy with the introduction of the Surface tablet, it is easy to make the case that Microsoft is sensitive to this shift in the market, and is attempting to maintain its position in the face of intense competition from Apple and Google. Windows 8 is designed to be essentially “device-agnostic” (as long as the device is supplied with a Microsoft-created OS), meaning that user behavior, apps installed, and data available on a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone should be exactly the same, independent of the device used.
If you read through our post from last week, you are aware that there is a huge caveat to this brave new world of anytime, anywhere access from any device: namely, that the bulk of apps in use today at law firms are not yet ready for the “tile mania” that is Windows 8. And the point-and-click, mouse-oriented applications that are the bread and butter of most firms don’t really play all that well on the pointing-oriented tablets that are proliferating throughout the business world. Ever tried to learn the “gestures” necessary to emulate a mouse on an iPad?
So, we believe that the software industry is about to experience a massive “do over” of virtually all of their products, to keep up with the hardware transition to pointing-oriented devices. This is a huge and expensive undertaking, and will likely cause some players to fall behind and disappear even as new leaders emerge. Those who are quickest to market with the best “fit” between the new hardware platform and their product’s functionality will thrive.
If any of you can remember the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, you will have some glimmer of what I believe we are about to experience. It wasn’t pretty, it was painful at times, and we lost some cherished apps along the way, but we survived. We will survive this transition, too. So stay nimble, and be prepared to move to new platforms, and new applications for your business-critical functions, when the time is right to do so.
We will do our best to help lead you through the maze over the next year or two. We recommend that you stay in touch with us as you ponder your future technology purchases, to insure that you don’t get caught in any blind alleys.
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.