PCs 'could decline for years,' analyst warns in cutting outlook

It's no secret that the PC market is in trouble, but its future appears to be dimmer than previously thought.

Warning that sales of "PCs could decline for many years to come," Barclays Capital's hardware analyst Ben Reitzes cut his outlook for the sector through 2016. Reitzes blamed a variety of factors for the expected decline, including surging interest in tablets and confusion over Microsoft's recently released Windows 8.

"We are lowering our 2012-2016 PC forecasts due to weak macro conditions, confusion around Windows 8, ongoing cannibalization from tablets, and an elongation in replacement cycles," Reitzes wrote in a research note yesterday, according to Forbes.

Reitzes blamed the myopic PC industry for not recognizing and adjusting to consumers' shifting tastes to mobile devices, according to the report seen by Barrons:

 We believe a new generation of consumers and IT workers are figuring out how to compute differently than those that started using PC's in the 90's - relying more on mobile devices and the cloud - as PC's see significant "task infringement" by the day. As a result, it can no longer be assumed that the PC market can remain in the range of 350 million units a year - and we argue that the PC replacement cycle is in the process of being elongated by 1-2 years, resulting in the loss of 50-100 million units in annualized demand by 2015. After years of denial, most PC industry players still don't seem to realize what is happening - and don't have contingency plans.

Reitzes cut his 2012 forecast for PC units sold to 352.75 million units, down 3 percent as well as his 2013 prediction to 338.34 million, a 4 percent decline from his previous forecast.

Tablets are expected to reap the benefit of PCs' decline, with Reitzes raising his estimates for the market, predicting 182 million units in 2013 compared to his previous estimate of 146 million, and 230 million in 2014, a dramatic increase over his prior 139 million estimate.

While Reitzes expects Apple to control the majority of the tablet market at least through 2016, he said Google, Samsung, and Amazon "have the ability to expand the non-Apple market quite a bit and we believe these 3 companies can sustain 30-40% share of the market (combined) over the longer term."

Reitzes' dire prediction comes on the heels of market researchers' data showing that PC sector "withdrew sharply in the third quarter, with shipments falling more than 8 percent from the prior year.

New e-skin is sensitive to touch and self-healing

The human skin, with all its frailties, turns out to be difficult to recreate, let alone improve on. The main challenge: It manages to be both self-healing and sensitive to the touch, enabling it to send vital information to the brain about temperature and pressure.

But chemists and engineers at Stanford say they are one step closer to developing an electronic skin that has both these properties, and they report this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that it could help lead to smarter prosthetics and more resilient, self-repairing electronics.
Their central task was to find a self-healing material (a plastic polymer would ordinarily do the trick) that was also a good conductor of electricity (which typically requires metals). "To interface this kind of material with the digital world, ideally you want it to be conductive," Benjamin Chee-Keong Tee, a researcher on the project, said in a school news release.
They found that a plastic made of long chains of molecules linked up via hydrogen bonds provided weak attractions between differently charged regions of atoms, which result in self-healing. Because the molecules easily break apart and then reorganize to restore their original structure, the result is a flexible material they describe as feeling -- even at room temperature -- like saltwater taffy left in the fridge.
They then embedded tiny particles of nickel into the polymer to increase its strength. Tee calls these rough surfaces "mini-machetes," with tiny electrical fields that enable current to easily flow from one particle to another.

"Most plastics are good insulators, but this is an excellent conductor," said lead researcher and chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao.
The material is also sensitive enough to detect the pressure of a handshake, whether that pressure be downward or flexing, meaning a prosthetic limb could detect the actual degree of bend in a joint. And coating electrical devices in this material could render those devices capable of getting electricity flowing again if they are damaged.
Bao's team is now concentrating on the next goal: to make the material both stretchy and transparent, so that it could wrap around and overlay electronic devices or display screens.

Facebook says it again: We are mobile

Facebook really wants people to know that it's got its mind on mobile.
The company put out a blog post today detailing the work of its product teams since its mobile first transformation. Wall Street has been highly critical of Facebook in the past for not paying attention to mobile, which is where many users have moved.
But now, Facebook says, it's all about mobile. The company has been updating its main Facebook app frequently, and paying attention to standalone apps is key to that process, Product Manager Michael Eyal Sharon wrote in the post. He used the example of the update released earlier this week that integrated Camera and Messenger features into the main app.
"Having mobile apps designed for the most popular mobile activities allows us to take the best features from each and cross-pollinate with our core Facebook for iOS and Android apps," he wrote. "However, this also introduces the challenge of deciding which features make the most sense for the core apps and figuring out how to implement them."
Sharon said the solution has involved retooling the development process. In the last year, Facebook has been making the switch from a focus on desktop to a focus on mobile by making every engineer a mobile developer. This means engineers on the Camera team or the Messenger team are responsible for creating apps for both desktop and mobile. In the past, Facebook had one small mobile team dedicated to the main app.

The main app, was known to be painfully slow, so Facebook has been shipping out updates often in hopes of improving the experience.
"Having a single team own the product experience in their standalone apps as well as the integrated experience in the core app means that we have more thoughtfully executed experiences across platforms and applications," Sharon wrote.
His post is not just about patting Facebook's engineers on the back. The company is sticking to its messaging -- mobile, mobile, mobile -- to let its 600 million mobile users know that they come first. And, to remind Wall Street that the company finally has a mobile strategy.