HP and Dell Are Just Victims of Tech Evolution

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In most industries leadership tends to abide.

Kellogg(K) is still a leading cereal company a century after the cereal boom went bust. Ford Motor(F) and General Motors(GM) still lead in cars. While their owners have changed with the years, the big studio names of the silent screen era -- Paramount, Universal, and United Artists -- remain vital today.

This is not true in technology. Most of International Business Machines'(IBM) competitors from the 1950s and 1960s were forgotten by the 1970s. Since then whole technologies have been left behind, their pioneers with them:

Minicomputers were the story of the early 1970s, but market leaders Digital Equipment and Data General did not make it to the end of the century.
Word processors boomed in the mid-1970s, but leaders like Wang Labs and Lanier Business Products were trampled by the growth of PCs.
Graphic workstations from Silicon Graphics were all the rage in the 1980s. By early in the last decade SGI was headed for the scrap heap.

What seems self-evident today is that the PC paradigm -- the combination of TV, typewriter and tape recorder pioneered 35 years ago -- is fading out. It's being replaced by devices, the typewriter replaced by a more direct interface with the screen, the tape recorder replaced by memory chips and a wireless interface with the Web.

Microsoft(MSFT) is doing all it can to remain relevant in the new era. Windows 8 is the most important product it has rolled out since it won the operating system from IBM over 20 years ago. If it can't convince consumers that tablets and phones running Windows 8 are the equal of those running Google's(GOOG) Android or Apple's(AAPL) iOS, it's in deep, deep trouble.

But Microsoft's old Windows manufacturing partners are in deeper trouble. That's the lesson of earnings releases from Dell(DELL) , reported at Investorplace.com, and Hewlett-Packard(HPQ) , reported by Business Week.