Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As a kid, I loved playing Atari’s video games. All those memories came back as I was reading Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers , when he talked about the existential threat to companies like Atari when the (then) new home computers came to the market. Perhaps it was inevitable because one of the most popular use for home computers was, well, playing games. Sure, the graphics on home computers back then may have been non-existent (or sucked), but the primitive games were addictive nonetheless. A few pioneers thought they could even make money writing and selling computer games, and this gave rise to a small industry. That in turn soon attracted a certain class of programmers who considered it a challenge to render better graphics on the available hardware. Their success led to better graphics in computer games, which in turn attracted more buyers, which then created the need to write yet more games. The circle had begun. Since writing computer games was very effort intensive, it a...

Joshua Topolsky said that Steve Jobs’ famous “the post-PC era” comment was partly a marketing strategy, not just about a technological shift: “In this new world, Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to…In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It's not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.” And so, said Topolsky : “Apple need only delight consumers and tell them that specs and speed are the domain of a dinosaur called the PC…Apple isn't claiming victory in the Space Race -- it's ceding space to the competition…But guess who gets Earth all to itself?” And Jobs was proven right. While PC sales flattened and even fell, tablet sales soared. As MG Siegler wrote this year: “As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad woul...