The Era of Their Ways: Apple’s Post-PC World Is Microsoft’s PC-Plus Future

Apple CEO Steve Jobs once compared the transition from desktop and laptop PCs to tablets with the transition from trucks to cars, saying that the post-PC era was nigh.

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at D8. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

Two years after Jobs uttered those words, are we truly in the post-PC era, as he claimed?

Not according to Microsoft. During his Worldwide Partner Conference keynote Wednesday, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said we’re not in the post-PC era, but the PC-plus era.

“I want you to know we believe that Apple has it wrong,” Turner said. “They’ve talked about it being the post-PC era. They talk about how the tablet and the PC are different. And the reality in our world, we think that’s completely incorrect. We actually believe Windows 8 is the new era for the PC-plus, and we think that’s very strategic for us going forward. And we believe that you can have a great content consumption and creation device be one and the same. We believe with a single push of a button you can move seamlessly in and out of both worlds. We believe that you can have touch, a pen, and a mouse and a keyboard. We believe you can have end-user security and management.”

Who’s right? Who cares?

Unless you’re still bound by the antiquated and frankly asinine idea that the iPad is not a content-creation device, Microsoft’s vision of the PC-plus world sounds an awful lot like the one that users of Apple products are already living in.

(Image courtesy of The Verge)