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Why The U.S. PC Market is On The Decline
conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the recent woes of Apple and Dell. One possible reason according to the article: 'imminent price wars'." From the article: "'There's a softness in the market that's building,' says Richard Shim, a senior research analyst at IDC. In the past two weeks, IDC cut its 2006 forecast for U.S. PC growth to 5.7%, from 6.8%. 'In '04 and '05 there was tremendous growth. In a market that's as mature as this industry is, there's no way you can maintain those levels.'"
Gee Dell and Apple will be announcing their projected numbers in a few days. Well, I guess we'd all better listen to the "analysts" whose accuracy rate is about the same as flipping a coin. Speculation and stock fluctuations before these announcements is pretty much par for the course as people make guesses in the hopes of a stock market win. The rest of us, however, are a lot more concerned about Q1 and Q2 numbers that actaully, you know are how much they are selling.
My computer was built in 2002, and for my home still serves as a fileserver for 4 computers and a test web and database server. The "kiosk" laptop we use to surf the web and play streaming music is a Pentium III. No problemos here with linuxes (statiticians, please add 3 to linux column and subtract same from Operating Systems "in use").
Vista is a great name for MS's next OS: Chance I would use it is WAY off in the distance.
-KB
G4 Sawtooth 450mhz updated to: 2.0ghz Powerlogix with, 2.0gb PC 133 ram, Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb, 80+120gb WD HDs running on ATA 66, + SATA 3.0 4 channel card running a 400gb Samsung + 16x Pioneer DVD+-RW. Tiger 10.4.7 / 19in Envision LCD.
This machine is 6 years old, and runs Quake 4, Doom 3, and Halo like a dream. I don't see any reason to upgrade to a G5 when I am running 86+ scores on Xbench. I probably won't upgrade for another year at least.
Yea, it has a 100mhz bus, and fights between resources, but if im doing one or 2 things at a time, it flies.
http://www.kore-net.com/office/sawtooth.jpg
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
In the Smithsonian's technology exhibit, I saw a graph that marked the rise of television in the 1950s. It was a saturation curve, rising very quickly at the 40 to 50 percent level, and then flattening and gradually moving up at, IIRC, 70 to 80 percent. I'm sure the transition to color and solid state provided some turnover, as will the hi-def transition we are in now.
The lesson though, is that PCs will saturate too. They can surf the web and play DVDs. They can do word processing, spreadsheets, and most of the other "killer apps" people need. There's no more reason for turnover, and those that want 'em got 'em. I was looking out for this, and figured the real saturation started in the late 90s. For years, the state of the art PC was "about $2000", and then suddenly, very capable machines dropped through the $1000 floor. The vendors must have seen the curve flattening, so they had to reach into that lower price market to drive sales. That was the beginning of the end.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?