Let's not confuse wounded and dead: the Personal Computer

New data is in: PC sales are down for the fifth straight quarter.

Observers jumping onto the "PC is dead" bandwagon is in full swing, needless to say.

There is no doubt that the desktop PC (and maybe even moreso the laptop) is wounded. Perhaps critically so, because there's a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy effect going on in an ecosystem like this. Hardware, application, and platform developers all need to fundamentally believe in a profitable future or they will stop investing.

My point is it doesn't have to be that way.

Granted - tablets and smartphones are already better for a whole bunch of situations where a user is primarily in media consumption mode. And consuming content on-the-move? Absolutely no contest.

But what about the other use case? What will give me the best possible user experience when I'm actually focused on on doing something with my device? As in, the anti- "I'm at Starbucks, sipping a latte, browsing the latest fashion on Instagram" use case?

Like playing a AAA video game. Or crunching on a 500-row Excel sheet. Or writing a book.

Crazy as it sounds, people still actually create stuff, make things, and entertain themselves without an insatiable appetite to be multitasking "on-the-go". We're OK just sitting on our ass, sometimes, and want that to be a really great experience.

Who should win the battle over that second use case?

1. Mobile/tablet/embedded computing developers who need to worry about battery life, tiny form-factors, high costs, closed ecosystems, and fidgety input schemas for these uses?

2. Or, the desktop/living room developers who have access to basically infinite processing power, high-rez big-format displays, and comfortable mouse/keyboard/controller inputs?

There should be two huge markets here solving two obviously distinct use cases. But instead we've got one going full-steam and the other gravely wounded.

Please, someone innovate and making sitting here at my desk a great experience again...

You're only as good as your last film.

So the Hollywood adage goes.

In the news today in the gaming world, Don Mattrick, who was in charge of the Xbox division is moving to Zynga to take over from Mark Pincus as CEO.

Not surprisingly, online commentary has been brutal. One of my favorites was Christopher Bowen, Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, posting on gamesindustry.biz: "those two deserve each other". Ouch!

Both Mattrick and Zynga have struggled lately. Zynga has seen an exodus of executives, a plummeting share price, and doesn't seem to have clear strategy laid out to repeat their early success on Facebook. Mattrick failed pretty miserably at the Xbox One product launch & PR.

That said...

Here's a guy who helped build, very arguably, the single biggest gaming brand of the past decade.

And here's a company that as a start-up created a completely new category of gaming, introduced tens, if not hundreds, of millions of humans to video games, and set the gold standard for a variety of topics including data analytics and cross-platform promotion for the whole industry.

That's not too shabby. And I haven't seen either come up once in commentary about this move.

But, then again, we're back to that old Hollywood adage...