Having just survived election season, we are all very much attuned to “key indicators” that can help to predict outcomes. Certainly we have seen no lack of these in the press over the past few months, some accurate, some not so much.

In the technology industry, a key indicator that has been monitored for years is the sale of memory chips, as a predictor of future PC sales volume. A recent change in this statistic can be interpreted as an early warning sign of a sea change in the technology marketplace.

For the first time in history, sales of memory chips for mobile devices have eclipsed sales of chips for PCs. This shift suggests that, in the next three or four years, we may well see large-scale displacement of PCs as the “workhorse” of office technology in favor of tablets, smartphones, and other smaller devices. Certainly hardware suppliers, by their ordering behavior, are banking on this trend to accelerate.

Assessing Microsoft’s recent rollout of Windows 8, along with the unveiling of its own tablet strategy with the introduction of the Surface tablet, it is easy to make the case that Microsoft is sensitive to this shift in the market, and is attempting to maintain its position in the face of intense competition from Apple and Google. Windows 8 is designed to be essentially “device-agnostic” (as long as the device is supplied with a Microsoft-created OS), meaning that user behavior, apps installed, and data available on a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone should be exactly the same, independent of the device used.

So, what does this have to do with Sage 50 / Peachtree?

If you read through the post from our sister company (Eastern Legal Systems) last week, you are aware that there is a huge caveat to this brave new world of anytime, anywhere access from any device: namely, that the bulk of apps in use today in small business are not yet ready for the “tile mania” that is Windows 8. The point-and-click, mouse-oriented applications that are the bread and butter of most small businesses don’t really play all that well on the pointing-oriented tablets that are proliferating throughout the business world. Ever tried to learn the “gestures” necessary to emulate a mouse on an iPad?

This is certainly true of Peachtree, and its current incarnation as Sage 50. None of the current “flavors” of this product will run as “tiled” applications in the way that Microsoft intends within the Windows 8 environment. This means that – for now, anyway – a user who wants to load Peachtree on a Windows 8 PC will need to close the tile interface to run Peachtree, and re-open it to run their other tile-friendly applications. Not exactly a boon to user productivity.

We believe that the software industry is about to experience a massive “do over” of virtually all of their products, to keep up with the hardware transition to pointing-oriented devices. We expect Sage to follow this path, as well. Indeed, with their emerging emphasis on “cloud-based” enhancements to this legacy accounting application, we think Sage is on track to – eventually – eliminate the on-premises portion of Sage 50 entirely, relying on the device’s browser to connect the user to the app residing in the cloud. Where the customer’s accounting data will reside – in the cloud, on the device, or an on-premises server – is still anybody’s guess. Maybe all of those will be options for the user to select.

If any of you can remember the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, you will have some glimmer of what I believe we are about to experience. It wasn’t pretty, it was painful at times, and we lost some cherished apps along the way, but we survived. We will survive this transition, too.

So stay nimble, and be prepared to move to those new hardware platforms as those platforms make it possible to enhance the functionality of products like Sage 50 / Peachtree.

Until that happens, our advice is to stay away from Windows 8. Microsoft has publicly committed to supporting Windows 7 through the end of 2020, and will allow hardware manufacturers to sell Windows 7 preinstalled on new PCs for at least another year or two. We believe that will allow sufficient time for Sage, and other software manufacturers, to develop a workable strategy for deploying their apps in this new “multi-device” environment we see emerging.

We will do our best to help lead you through the technology maze over the next year or two. We recommend that you stay in touch with us as you ponder your future technology purchases, to insure that you don’t get caught in any blind alleys in making decisions about technology.