But thank goodness business users will keep the desktop technology commercially viable for probably more than our lifespans.  Thank you, business, for letting us ride on your coattails.

The main advantage to the desktop for business presently is that there are a lot of cheap components available from which to assemble a lot of cheap systems. But well within my lifetime, businesses ran on central servers and really, really dumb terminals. The PC displaced a lot of those systems for a variety of reasons, including aggressive marketing,  the perceived ability to lay off expensive IT guys who did stuff that managers did not understand, and the ability to replace secretaries with cheap machines and force high paid white collar guys to do their own typing, scheduling and mailing. 


Now we are moving back into the server-terminal model albeit in the cloud. The IT guys work on the other side of the world for cheap, the software is rented and maintained by the lessor, and the executives still have to do their own typing. At the same time we are reaching the technological ability to put a supercomputer in every workstation. Actually current desktops have much more power than the servers in the basement that used to run business computing. Using a supercomputer as a terminal to mediate between an executive/typist and a remote cloud server does not make much technological sense, and does not make any business sense at all. 


Many businesses are supplying their people with laptops, which in addition to providing more than enough capacity to connect to the cloud, allow them to make their executive/typists work composing meaningless memos and masturbating indecipherable spreadsheets while they are supposed to be on vacation with their family camping out of range of the internet. The desktop is very likely to be replacde by the laptop, as was the hourly worker by the salaried one.


In any event, the driving force to make huge numbers of increasingly capable desktop workstations is being eroded by cloud computing. More likely the future in business will be large screens (to impress the executive/typists with how important they are), attached to smart terminals. There is a good possibility that there will be a shakeout even in the smart terminal market to leave only a few dominant models, like the IBM Selectric dominated the typewriter market at the dawn of the personal computer age. Do not expect business to drive the kind of computer development that will make the great new DAWs.