Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. We're here today with Benedict Evans and Stevensonovsky

in another one of our hallway-style conversations. In this episode, they discuss what happens when

the S-curve levels out, and especially as more and more businesses are relying on devices that need

only browsers and internet connectivity, what will the $200 bucks sitting at an employee's

workstation look like? Or more broadly,

how do tech devices evolve for the enterprise from the mainframe to the PC to the tablet and the

smartphone? So I'm Benedict Evans. I'm here with Stevensonovsky. And we've been talking a fair

bit around the kind of fundamental platform shift that's going on in tech from PC,

Wintel, mouse, Windows-based computers to mobile operating systems. And we thought it was kind of

interesting to talk about what happens to the PC in that environment. And maybe the kind of a good

way to set up that conversation is to go back and think about what happened to the mainframe,

because in a

previous generation, mainframes and mini computers and workstations lost their position at the

center of the tech industry to the PC and to the client server and so on. But that didn't mean

that the mainframe business just kind of evaporated the day after Windows 95 shipped. Instead,

actually IBM's mainframe business grew really healthily throughout the 2000s. And so it's interesting now as we think, well, it's one thing to say

that the center of gravity and tech moves to mobile and moves to mobile operating systems

and all these use cases will slowly move. But what happens to the other half of that story?

What is the 5, 10, 20 year half life of the PC look like?

Yeah, it's super interesting. I'd like to put some

color on that because I think that a lot of people don't really realize this. But, you know,

back in like 1993-94, IBM was on the brink of bankruptcy. And the theory was that that PCs were

...