Perhaps a better title for my post from Friday (”The irrelevance of desktop Linux”) would have been “The irrelevance of the desktop PC”. The AP has published an interesting article about PC trends in Japan that provides some context and outlines the opportunity that does exist for Linux as a client operating system.

“Japan’s PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics,” the report states. “Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC.”

Of course PC makers have come to a different conclusion about the future potential of the PC, but consumer usage trends suggest that PC demand in Japan is likely to continue to decline. “More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the AP report continues.

“The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely. The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.

“And while a lot of the decline is in household PCs, businesses are also waiting longer to replace their computers partly because recent advances in PC technology are only incremental, analysts say. At a consumer electronics event in Tokyo in October, the mostly unpopular stalls showcasing new PCs contrasted sharply with the crowded displays of flat-panel TVs.”

As I noted in the update to Friday’s post the opportunity for Linux ‘lies in no longer thinking about the desktop as being defined by the traditional PC‘. Open source has been successful where it causes disruption. Making Linux look and feel like Windows with the hope that it might gain more than 4% of the PC market is not disrupting the market.

I also wrote ‘as the PC increasingly becomes a device for accessing online services the technology that runs on the PC itself increasingly becomes irrelevant to the consumer‘. I was struggling to think beyond the PC myself - the point is that new appliance-style client devices will emerge that will make the PC - and the client operating system - irrelevant. The opportunity for Linux lies in those client devices.