Jean-Louis Gasseé, gather of the Macintosh II and the BeOS, is a canny thinker and doer in tech. Even though he doesn’t quite have the track record of, say, Steve Jobs (by inches), he does know what he’s talking about, he guided not one but two great PC platforms, and he’s worth listening to when he has something to say about the rising trends.
On his blog today, he writes about “Very Personal Computing,” the arrival of the smartphone as the most profitable sector of the tech industry. As he notes, the PC is finally moving toward a state of less relevance, at least from a business perspective. Despite being No. 1 in PCs, HP realizes around 1/6th of the profit from that business that Apple does from the iPhone. That, as should be noted, is despite the fact that Apple isn’t even one of the top 5 manufacturers of phones on the planet.
This is absolutely essential reading, especially in thinking about the next big wave of mobile innovation. HP’s acquisition of Palm is really one to watch…
Via Daring Fireball
