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The Dying PC Market
An anonymous reader writes "The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, digital video recorders with terabytes of memory
NEC's annual PC shipments in Japan shrank 6.2 percent to 2.72 million units in 2006, and the trend is continuing into the first quarter of fiscal 2007 with a 14 percent decline from a year earlier. Sony's PC shipments for Japan shrank 10 percent in 2006 from a year earlier.
"The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones," said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.
"Consumers aren't impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That's not as exciting as a bigger TV," Katayama said. "And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright.""
they'll figure out how important PCs are once they want to start designing those video games, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
None of those could exist without the PC.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
They're just not upgrading every year?
Before you argue your point against this. Look up what some other people said about the mainframe. In short: to most responses
A. Yes there are things that PC can do that Devices cannot do as well. But a lot of people are willing to take that tradeoff for mobility
B. No the PC will be a Dying market but will take a Long time before it dies. Look at the Mainframe market it is a dying market but it never completely dies.
Change is scary but it will happen the trick is try to keep your sills diverse enough to account for this.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"digital video recorders with terabytes of memory"
Where? I want one!
I wonder if this is true or if we are just at a place where many casual users don't need to upgrade as often? Many of the advances of the last few years have been pretty incremental, or don't affect your average end user too much. If they can browse the web, send email, and run a few apps like Word Processing and Spreadsheets, that's all they need.
The advances of the last few years have gotten to the point where many people are satisfied and don't need to buy a new one. The only excpetion to this is the Gamer market, and I can see why gadget-crazy Japan might prefer Sony PS3 and Wii's to pc gaming.
I wonder if the people looking purely at sales are making a pretty basic error here, though.
That's a good thing, since computers have been fast enough for most purposes for quite some time. If the manufacturers focus less on speed and more on size/power consumption I don't see how that's a bad thing.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Maybe the lowering pc sales is a result of the quality of computers and software, rather than the other gadgets being that good?
From my experience for example, Sony has made products which have more style over practical usage. I'm not going to pay $2000 for a styled pc which you can't use and breaks a month out of warranty.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The PC marketing isn't dying. It's changing. If people realized this we wouldn't have alarmist articles and we'd have a lot less useless stats. Every one of the "PC as we know it" makers today has the ability to adapt, to plan to make smaller hardware footprints, etc. We know the PC cannot totally disappear because you'll never see a room of programmers on a project sitting around compiling, testing, debugging and deploying applications using just a cell phone/PDA interface or equivalent. What is a PC? Does it really matter how small it gets? As long as some people still have access to a standard sized monitor and keyboard they will consider anything a PC, even if it's stuck to a postage stamp on your desk.
PCs are not vanishing, only the number of people that don't have one.
What is the point of a new computer when the existing one do the tasks you need.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
We're at a point where most non-hardcore gamers/mulitmedia types don't need to stay abreast of the upgrade cycle. This isn't the 1990s anymore, though a lot of us here like to imagine it is. There are a lot of things a PC does that no other machine does well (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) that even average consumers need. Then we get to the fact that PCs can do a range of tasks that it would take half-a-dozen other machines to accomplish. "Death of the PC" stories are nice to get people riled, but they don't have much substance.
This is primarily because cellphones in Japan aren't pieces of crap like those sold in the US. Helio's only starting to turn that around right now, and they're the only carrier I'd support if I returned to America. Here in China I get the best of both- advanced phones (Samsung and LG like to give the Chinese market nearly all of what they have given the Korean market) and cheap prices. For example, prepaid runs less than $.01/min, and I can get 450 minutes/month for $8. Beat that, AT&T. Oh, and population density- China Unicom's quite willing to cover the mountains where there are approximately 5 people/sq.km, as opposed to AT&T where I get spotty coverage at best in downtown Nashville (better than before I moved to China where I couldn't even get any coverage on AT&T).
OSx86 FTW
I've been using my Wii to browse the net.
In fact, I'm typing this comment with it.
It works well, especially since the wiiware USB keyboard code upgrade, but for some reason, I can't reply to my gmail messages or view videos made with a more recent version of flash... hopefully these issues will be resolved soon with an update.
For the rest of my online needs, I use the workplace computer.
I fully expect a ton of comments on how the PC is vital to every day life these days, but I live in Japan as an English teacher (wanted to be back for a bit before going to school again) and I can tell you it seems like the article is right.
In the big electronics stores, like K's or Yamada Denki, PCs aren't the big draws - it's other stuff, including TVs.
Out of my middle school students, many of them don't use PCs on a regular basis and many of the high school students I know don't either (though I am in basically the Arkansas of Japan, but even when I lived in Osaka, I felt like this was true). Those that do don't have their own, they use their parent's. Most of what we do on a PC, including casual games, e-mail, and web surfing (and increasingly other things - my cell phone has a decent 2MB camera [a friend of mine has the summer's top of the line au phone with a 5MB], an MP3 player with iTunes like software ([au's lismo service]), Japanese/English dictionary, and simple Japanese OCR).
It's part of the reason why the web channel on the web was a big deal. For Americans, it just meant we might not have had to get out of bed to check Gmail, but for a lot of Japanese is was an important vector onto the Internet.
That said, when I went to college in Japan a lot of my friends ending up buying laptops or using them extensively in the school's various computer labs. And at work now, everyone can use a PC and desktop publishing / graphics (granted, I work at a town cultural hall, so they might come to the job with some of those skills already). One of my coworkers is even a Mac guy and another, the main graphics guy is thinking about upgrading from his Toshiba to a MacBook. Stuff like Macs and the iPod are going more ground here.
And the internet culture here is still pretty big - most people my age know about 2chan, even if they don't post and the big drama from two years ago was Densha Otoko, based on a supposedly true story about a nerdy anime fan who met a beautiful girl, began dating her, and asked for help on 2chan. You can still get 2chan's mascot, noma neko dolls around as well. Mixi (an invite only Japanese facebook site) and other internet groups are still pretty big here, so it's not like the things computers represent are going away, but rather PCs like devices, like phones and game consoles, are taking their place.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
"The future of PCs isn't bright."
Of course it is. PCs will always be with us, they will just be in the tv or phone perhaps, where they work every time. What future isn't bright is that of the stand alone PC that has a piece of shit OS or a hardware lock-in or needs too much configuration but makes its CEO bazillions of dollars for your suffering.
Maybe the lowering pc sales is a result of the quality of computers and software, rather than the other gadgets being that good?
Declining sales are a direct result of the M$ domination and digital restrictions. No one wants Vista but they would it it did what half of the set top boxes did. People want MythTV and a website that shares their photo album. Free software offers the best quality versions of what people want and Japan has more than enough network to support it. Thanks to the M$ domination it's hard to get a PC with anything but Vista and sales reflect this world wide, not just in Japan. Hardware is more than capable but it's been crippled by media publishers who would be happy to see general purpose computing and the internet dissapear.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The article cites companies saying their growth market is in countries where most people have never owned a PC before, and also that existing customers see no compelling reason to upgrade. The average user is happy with the PC they have, indeed they don't even use all the system capability they already own. They prefer to spend their money on something else. In the wealthy "developed" world, a PC now is a commodity appliance rather than a trendy status symbol. It's all part of an innovation becoming a mature product.
The year of Linux on the desktop is irrelevant, because the desktop itself is irrelevant. Linux flood fills computing niches. It's already everywhere.
Deleted
How on earth did this particular meme come to be in the first place? Did someone horribly misspell 'First Post'?
"And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright."
Jesus, that must be the most stupid statement of the year.
and when they all go blind from staring at those tiny assed screens, we will have them right where we want them...okay, not really, but who can surf the web on a smart phone and really enjoy it? NOT ME! I can't get a good view of my pr0n let alone anything else!!!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
PC = Personal Computer
My smartphone has MS Office compatible word processor, spreadsheet, and database. It sends email and browses the web. It takes photos and manages my budget. It has an always-on map (Google Maps) that I can use to get my position and/or directions anywhere.
It IS a personal computer.
PCs aren't dying, they're getting integrated more closely into our lives.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
They need applications.
People need something to do personal finances, write up school homework, manage their photos and music and to send emails and surf the web.
Average people need a nice powerful PDA in a sub-notebook form factor that can hook up to a large screen and they need a PDA/Phone that fits in their pocket that can sync up with their full size PDA.
AVerage people don't care about writing their own software or customizing their experience (beyond wallpaper and ringtones)....
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This may not mean much at all for other countries. Home PCs has never caught on in Japan the same way as in Europe and the USA. The gaming market is completely dominated by consoles. Games like World of Warcraft haven't even been translated into Japanese, and very few play the English version.
digital video recorders with terabytes of memory
To think, we often wonder how Joe Average can manage to screw up such a basic concept, and now we get it in a Slashdot FP???
C'mon, guys - Memory != Storage. Write it 100 times.
Their currency has been deflating year on year for a decade or so. This is important for manufacturers because it means that the money becomes more valuable over time, not less valuable. This means that when you're spending that money, you want to spend it on something which will last a long time, you buy quality rather than crap. When a currency is inflating, it's best to get rid of it quickly knowing that the longer you hold it the less it's worth. People become less choosy about buying cheap crap.
The result is that the more inflation there is the more disposable the society becomes. PCs are inherently disposable, 2-3 years before being surpassed or upgraded. As the article suggests, making the PC a sort of home hub is probably the best option for producers there. Something like MythTV should go down well.
Deleted
Back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, some outfit sold a household electric motor.
That's right. Just a motor.
These days people don't go out and buy electric motors, but there are probably several within 50 feet of where you are sitting, including maybe one in your wristwatch and several in your PC.
The PC is rapidly becoming an embedded appliance or in some cases a mix between an appliance and a PC.
Embedded appliances include routers, DVRs, regular cell phones, car radios, mp3 players, network-attached-storage devices, and other gadgets.
Mixed devices include PalmPilots, iPhones, and other hand-held computing devices that outperform the full-sized PCs of yesteryear as well as Living-Room/Media-Center computers that specialize in media presentation but are usable as PCs. The latter are usually more powerful than your typical desktop PC.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Let's have a sense of perspective - this is Japan we're talking about. Smaller gadgets always have more impact on the Japanese market, and that will influence the market for PCs. Not that the overall prediction of PCs becoming less important is wrong, but it's premature to suggest that this is happening outside of Japan.
For one, just because something happened in the past for one technology, doesn't hold that it will happen now for another. Predicting the future by saying the same changes that happened in the past will happen now is no more accurate than predicting the future by saying there will be no change from now.
However the other thing is, as far as I can tell, the mainframe market is as good as it ever was. Mainframe sales never died, or even waned, there just never have been that many of them. There still are people who buy mainframes, just not a whole lot. It wasn't that the PC supplanted the mainframe, more that it augmented it. We have probably 20,000-30,000 PCs where I work but we still have 2 mainframes and are likely to buy a third.
So if you wanted to claim that the PC situation will be the same as the mainframe situation, it would be more accurate to say that PCs are going to continue to do just fine, they are just going to be far eclipsed by personal devices like cell phones.
Also, the article, as they often do, seems to have a body that is different form the headline. The headline would imply that people are ditching their PCs, just using other devices. The body, however, reveals they are just not upgrading them as fast. Ahh, well that's a little different, now isn't it? PC use isn't declining just because sales decline, that just means people aren't buying them as often. This is not highly surprising since, all else aside, you don't need a new PC as bad as you used to.
I remember when PCs were just universally slow. Just doing normal things they took an amount of time that wasn't acceptable to people. Apps took 30 seconds or more to load, and don't get me started on how long you could have to wait on a print job. As such you always felt like you needed an upgrade. When something faster came out, you wanted it. After all, your current experience sucked, you wanted to make it better. Well that's not the case any more. Even on older hardware, things happen in a reasonable amount of time. It's not as fast as newer hardware, but we are talking the difference between a 1 and 5 second load time and such. There just isn't the feeling that you really need more power all the time.
That's well and good, and that combined with market saturation (everyone who wishes to have a PC already having one) will lead to slower sales. However it doesn't mean it'll lead to any less usage.
The definition of "Personal Computer" is just morphing to fit modern technology.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think I agree with the posts saying that PC users are just not upgrading as frequently. Ever since my old VIC-20 days, I've been an avid computer user and have upgraded to a new machine every 2 to 3 years. In fact, 3 years would have been a lot. However, the computer I'm using now is one I built in 2003. Oh my goodness! That's four years ago. I did recently did a multimedia upgrade on it; but this 4 year old machine runs everything from Photoshop CS3 to Oblivion just fine thank you. It even does a decent job on the Crysis demo. Yes, I do have it in my plans to finally build a new machine next year...probably around this time, but that will mean that I've nearly doubled my upgrade interval--and it's not because of money, its simply because the tech is not advancing quite as quickly as it used to relative to the kind of software that I like to run. If someone from the outside was just looking at my credit card records to see my PC buying habits, I'm sure they'd say I must have given up on PCs and moved on to cell phones, DVRs, and console video games--when that would be the furthest thing from the truth. Sure, those other consumer devices are going to cut somewhat into PC sales as well, but that's ok. Personally, I'd like PCs to become a non-mainstream geeky kind of thing again anyway.
as the Mac in the past.
The iPhone is the king of convergence devices this year (in that it actually works well) but it still could never come close to replacing a PC. I don't think anything ever will - beyond a laptop with a holographic screen and voice input capability - which still is a PC.
And all these devices like the iPhone do are ultimately do are computerize previously analog-only devices and merge them together. It wasn't too far long ago that the phone was analog only. Same with the camera. Same with a music player (portable CD player previously). The farthest along that it has gone to encroaching on traditional PC turf is browsing or some PDA functions.
It may change in the future -- but I don't see AI or voice recognition input getting there anytime soon. A necessity for ultimately replacing the laptop or desktop and getting serious work done.
not stack
Your powers of deduction are teh pwnage young one.
which is totally what she said
the average PC user realizes that he doesn't need to upgrade just to be upgrading. doesn't matter if its hardware or software.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Used to be you could only play certain types of games on the PC. They typically required (or benefited from, at least) a fast machine, creating a demand for new hardware purely for the sake of playing the newest games. Now that these types of games are available on consoles, many consumers may have offloaded this "task" which had previously been the domain of PCs onto their consoles. Consequently, they don't have a need to buy new hardware. The PC they bought 2 years ago is still plenty fast to perform all the non-game tasks they bought it for. Web-browsing, email, word processing, manipulating digital pictures, etc.
""The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, digital video recorders with terabytes of memory NEC's annual PC shipments in Japan shrank 6.2 percent to 2.72 million units in 2006, and the trend is continuing into the first quarter of fiscal 2007 with a 14 percent decline from a year earlier. Sony's PC shipments for Japan shrank 10 percent in 2006 from a year earlier."
Yeah, right! Everyone knows the real reason is the increasing spread of illegal online PC sharing/downloading by people habituated to piracy by the illegal sharing of music and video! The real thing we need to fear is when people start downloading food online. When you see that starting to happen, run for the hills!
all the best,
drew
http://dangernovel.blogspot.com/
Danger - A Safe Bahamian Novel
Being written for NaNoWriMo 2007
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
You fail. Radio stack = tcp/ip stack equivalent for radio.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot :-)
(though I am in basically the Arkansas of Japan, but even when I lived in Osaka, I felt like this was true).
People in Arkansas are not necessarily low-tech. There's a low cost of living in Arkansas that allows most households to acquire high-tech gadgets and PC's.
I live in a small town in a economically underdeveloped part of Arkansas, and even here, very few people don't use technology. Almost every household has multiple cell phones and a PC with some sort of internet connection. Granted, there are probably a lot of people in Arkansas that still use dial-up because there's not broadband available, but I'd say a majority of the small towns (populations < 2000) offer cable or dsl internet service.
Arkansas is also the home of Wal-Mart, which has been selling several brands of PCs since the mid-90's. You also can't find a Wal-Mart without a kiosk that's offering the latest cell phones.
You might also be surprised at some of the large tech companies based in Arkansas: Acxiom, Alltel (they don't just do wireless service!), and of course, Wal-Mart... these are just a few.
You are alone in the world.
I think this tendency is going to appear in the whole western world in not too long. The Japanese are a couple of years ahead of us. Most home-end users does not care about tasks where one would need a PC, most people just want to play games, surf the net and write some mail. And these tasks can be completed on a console or a mobile phone.
What concerns me as some one that lives and works on PCs, Mac, Linux, PC, is what future availability will be like. Development and production are like fast moving trains right now and they'll take a while to slow down but they almost have to slow down. I see desktop advances slowing in the next three years due to reduced demand. I have a feeling the market will go the way of american society where there will be the rich and the poor and little in between. By that I mean lower powered home PCs that are mostly a motherboard with built in audio and video and possibly many of those features hardwired into the CPU. They'll be smaller and lower power consumption and probably go largely blue tooth cordless so they take little installation. Then you'll have the expensive pro level machine for doing high end business use and graphics. Due to less demand and the expense of development they will likely increase in price and we might eventually go back to the back ole days when workstations cost 20K to 40K each, I hope we don't go back to 200K. There may be a middle ground where gamers and budget minded professional and business users live but gamers may be driven into the consol world and most businesses can live on home level machines. It'll take three to five years to see major changes and probably ten years for new sales models to completely take over but the gold rush of PC develpment is slowing. Without applications that demand speed the consumers won't demand faster machines. Video editing and gaming were the last things driving the market. Now most machines can do basic editing and gaming is shifting to consoles. Middle level graphics people like me will be the ones feeling the pinch. On the brightside machines will be fast enough that instead of half a dozen machines I'll be able to get by on one or two systems but due to expense most may have to go to leasing like many have with cars.
Consoles have taken the worst elements of PCs. Once they got a network, they became half-finished. You're always downloading new firmware, new game updates, and doing dumb shit like web browsing on it.
PCs are taking the worst elements of consoles. They're becoming locked down, DRMed boxes.
I don't think I like either direction.
People are now surrounded by PC's that are "good enough". They will be with us, however, until the display issues and crappy input modes are resolved on mobile platforms. The iPhone may be good, but it doesn't solve either of those issues. When we have virtual keyboards, or some other form of input, half the problem will be solved. When the people working on wearable displays get their technology perfected, then the other half will come into place. At that point, mobiles and PCs will merge.
Did PDAs die? No, their functionality was taken over by smartphones. The same thing will happen to PCs when the time is right. Until then, you will see slow and steady PC sales, with ups and downs, as people replace their current models at the end of their natural life. I won't upgrade to get a dual core PC until my current laptop dies, or I drop the thing and it breaks.
Could it be that like automobiles, pcs have reached a saturation point? Like automobile sales where once you have one or two in your family you don't need the expense of another one, you only get a replacement when needed?
I think pcs are like that now. The major growth period for hardware is over. Only when technology makes your current machine too old to run current programs do you need another.
I think a more important way to look at is that personal computers
(not "PC" which has come to mean the products of the Wintel hegemony)
represent the "anything" machine -- a programmable device that users
can decide the capabilities of, based on what software they buy (or
write). This is in strong contrast to fixed-purpose devices whose
features are limited to what the original manufacturers decide to
dole out to the poor consumer.
There is an eternal conflict between device makers, who generally want
to constrain function, and consumers (and their agents: software
makers), who often have custom desires for equipment they bought.
So a computer isn't a computer unless it has a big monitor and a large keyboard attached to it?
The real issue at hand is not the death of the PC, but the death of the acronym "Personal Computer". There are many examples of the computer integrating into the modern household in new and exciting ways:
A fridge that can take inventory (what you have and when you need to go back to the supermarket) without you needing to open it. It can also tell you what you can make with what you have.
A Home Theatre PC (HTPC) connected to your over-sized HDTV, giving you the ability play music, movies, surf the net, play games, record your favourite shows, and countless other tasks.
I am sure the computer will penetrate many more areas in the home on a larger scale as the architecture gets smaller and more efficient. Computer makers need to understand that it no longer makes sense to sell 50 different models of the same desktop PC.
A few months, actually. Long enough to understand/enjoy most of the memes.
In the early 1990s I had the privilege of talking with Don Norman, a psychologist who was a pioneer of computer usability studies (and who later went on to guide development of many products at Apple). Among other things, he opined that there wouldn't be any PCs in about 20-30 years (from then). I was pretty astonished, but he pointed out that in the 1950s-1970s you could buy an electric motor for you kitchen, and they were all the rage. You'd have one installed in your counter, and attach various things to it. By the 1990s you couldn't anymore -- motors were small enough and cheap enough that they were just embedded in any appliance (like a mixer) you might use.
He asserted that computers were going the same way -- you might end up with dozens of powerful computers in your house, but you wouldn't call them that. You'd call them a "newspad" or a "TV" or a "reader" or whatever. They'd be invisible, with specialized interfaces for whatever task was at hand.
So far, his prediction appears to be on track.
It seems to me that we have hit a technological plateau recently. This happens from time to time, when current designs have been played out. It happened with radio in the 1920s (broken by the superhetrodyne circuit), again in the 50s (broken by the transistor), then in the late 1960s and 70s (finally adopting FM over AM). In the wake of the innovation, many companies went out of business or had to go through massive changes.
The PC industry plateaued in the 1970s (miniframes and hobby computers), 1980s (death of 8-bit computers), 1990s (death of 8088 based PCs and 68000 series Macs), and we'll soon happen again, likely marked as the end of the Intel age. This is normal as technology doesn't develop in nice, easy to manage chunks. Moore's law just says that transistors will double every 18 months, not that everyone will have a use for all of them.
The growth in the market these days seems to be in microcontrollers, using designs that are becoming just as powerful as a PC without the OS tax. It is interesting to note that the trend is following the same software curve as before: authoring in assembler, migrating to simple microcode languages, stripped down OS (tiny Linux), custom OS (like Windows mobile smartphones and OS X on the iPhone). I wonder if the people writing the OS for these devices will realize that at one time Windows and DOS would fit on a few floppies.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
...and realizing their PC has been "fast enough" to do basic operations like word processing, media management, web browsing, etc. This all, despite the OS makers adding needless feature after needless feature to slow down their product and make upgrading hardware more attractive.
Overall, whether or not the PC market slows down is fairly irrelevant. Personal computers are an integral and ubiquitous part of our everyday lives and won't magically disappear just because of a market fluctuation. The PC manufacturers like Dell and HP will just have to realize they need to provide more effective long-term service and change their marketing model, instead of hammering out system after system.
How about:
"The dying Car market" we all know that it doesn't increase in sales...
"The dying candy market"
A year without growth doesn't mean anthing... Everyone isn't buying a new computer every year...
Quote from the Slashdot article: "The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing..."
It's sad that, after all these years, Slashdot editors have not learned to be editors.
Actually, the computers most people have are adequate for what they do. They don't need another computer. That's why manufacturers are selling fewer computers, not because "The PC's role is diminishing..."
http://www.stat.go.jp/English/data/handbook/c02cont.htm In 2005 this shows a growth rate of -0.01% and no growth in 2006. Added to the fact that the population is aging and adults already own functioning computers the decline of the PC market seems a little fallacious. How are the PC markets of developing nations doing? What about 20 or 30 years down the line when, hopefully, the economies of the markets OLPC have targeted mature and need to stock offices, homes and schools with PCs? Unless PCs are gone by then or are replaced by tablet-esque learning and business PCs then I think the computer industry can sleep quite calmly.
What is not bright is Japan's future. Their declining birth rate, unfavorable demographic trends and extremely racist attitudes that discourage immigration combine to assure that their society will decline steadily. Unless Japan can increase the birth rate, they will diminish.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Maybe most PC's are powerful enough and people figured out there is no reason to buy a new one every year? Heck mine is 6 years old and I see no reason to get a new one in the foreseeable future. My biggest problem is the lack of avaliability of new technology for old interfaces such as IDE and AGP. At least they make IDE SATA adaptors its unlikely the major GPU card manufacturers will continue to place new AGP releases on the market.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?cPath=66_68
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
...when he said that "The Network is the Computer" back in 1984. People mainly need an inexpensive & fun way to connect to the Internet, and with Internet-enabled phones, PDA's, and handheld devices becoming more ubiquitous, it would make sense that PC sales might slump. That doesn't mean that PC's are going away any time soon, it just indicates that the PC market is reaching maturity and saturation.
"There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people." - Thomas Jefferson
...is that a motor can be made as small as technology allows, but a screen and some sort of input device just have to be of a certain size to be comfortable for your eyes and hands.
I think a lot of functionality will eventually end up in smaller devices, but there will always be a number of apps that still need a pc-like device. Like browsing the web, managing music, videos and photo's, typing a document and making a presentation.
Separate devices for each and every app are a waste of money and space.
Come on. In a pinch, yeah, I'm glad I can surf on my Blackberry but there's no way a smart phone is going to supersede a computer for browsing the Web.
body massage!
I knew from the begining that this was the reason MS got into game consoles. They probably told themselves that they should hedge their bets in case another device than the PC gets more popular in homes. Their rational might have been: We stay aside, and sony and/or nitento might win this a make a ton of money; the pc being a mature market with limited growth, or consoles geting so powerful that they can just accomplish well enough most domestic computing tasks... Or, we can get involved. Best case scenario: we will make some money, or at least break even. we will leverage our expertise in game and framework designing to port and creat new games for the xbox... worst case, we slow down sony by vigourously competing with them. Nitendo being less and less relevent each day (mind you this is before the wii) We cannot afford to leave this market to sony only. If all we do is lose money on the project, it'll be considered as insurance for protecting our cash cow windows from an emerging competitor: sony..
The reason I'm not more gadget-oriented is because of telco behavior amoung other things. I'd really like to stop lugging the laptop around everywhere, I just feel all the current product and service offerings here in San Jose are rip-offs.
Less PCs out there means less people learning to code means less competition for my job. Maybe I can stop working 10 hours days to keep ahead of the other guy.
Their projections to Wall Street probably included a spike that hasn't happened.
Actually the US PC industry has been kicking as with respect to wall street expectations.
Microsoft beat expectations, including very good Vista sales, and broke through a five year ceiling of $30 and climbed to $37 last week after announcing earnings.
For the last three years HP has had a steady climb from $20 to $50. Analysts love their PC business.
For the last year and a half Intel has climbed from $17 to $27 as the Core architecture plugged the hole created by the Pentium 4 and that had let AMD gain market share. Analysts are in love with Intel again.
Dell is crawling out of a hole it fell into last years, analysts are starting to show interest in them again.
The problem is the Japanese economy. Last week they announced that unemployment had gotten worse. Sales are nearly flat year over year, industrial output down, exports to the US are down, exports to China are slowing, etc. Toyota stock has been going downhill all year, $138 to #113.
The market of a single nation shouldn't be considered a global indicator, especially when we know that nations population is also shrinking.
Correct - computers aren't advancing by leaps and bounds as they used to. 10 years ago, processor speed and capability doubled every year or 2. How many years now have we been stuck in the 3 to 4GHz speed?
...And Bill Gates' worst nightmare comes true, and he's out of a job. Partly it's his own fault. He wanted IE to be so integral to the OS that he convinced us that we should look at directories and file contents as web information inside browsers instead of using dedicated programs. Why not? Good idea. Then it's each source device's job to serve / present it's limited repertoire of information in a standard format, instead of leaving it all up to a central processor.
Also, I think the Windows interface, as a concept, has done all it can. We started with the DOS text interface, and anything up to a 286 handled that just fine. With graphical windows - you can add semitransparent windows, toolbars, right-click context menus, etc - but the basic OS interface is pretty fixed; and the computer has the power to handle it. The impetus with the run up from Win3.11 to 95, 98, XP, etc. was that the computer did not have the horsepower to meet the demand of the interface. (Remember screen redraws that could be a significant fraction of a minute? Especially AutoCad or print previews?) Now, computers breeze through that stuff.
I'm not sure what the next step will be. Voice interface? Context guessing (like Google tries to do)? 3D holographic? Virtual reality? Whatever it will be, that will probably be the driver for the next big advance in computers.
I used to think - the average Joe doesn't need a home computer. An embedded browser device that allows you to check your mail, compose simple office documents, and surf the web and read your email - that's all they need. However, the economics is such that there is no major cost savings in an appliance - the screen and keyboard are probably so much of the cost, that a crippled processor doesn't save you much. (Except maybe the OEM cost of Windows?) I suppose using the gaming console as the internet appliance bypasses that flaw in the argument. You buy something you need anyway, and it comes with whatever AJ would buy a computer for...
I think the computer of the future will "devolve". The focus will shift from the device and OS to the standards. The USB drive is a prime example. The standard "storage media" simply plugs into the standard interface. Watch for the same to happen with Ethernet. (It's pretty well there; think Apple Airport, NAS storage). Yourscreen device becomes a simple terminal - browser, basic appliance. your storage is a disk or several on your home network. Your printer, your camera, your scanner, your TV/PVR, speaker system, etc. If you have to do serious processing, you buy a server or 2 and plug them into the network.
All these devices are controlled via standard interfaces. We don't care what each embedded OS is, as long as we can do what we want with Web, Java, remote terminal protocols, streaming or whatever. Files are defined by the standard with which they are written - txt, jpg, mpg, mp3, xls, oo, avi, doc, pdf.
Tell that to M$. On the 360s system blade, the tab you use for clearing out your hard disk is called Memory.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
One country reporting a 6.2% drop in sales hardly warrants a sweeping declaration of a "dying PC market". Cell phones sound great; now, how many people here are posting to Slashdot using one? Anybody? If you are, won't the eyestrain and finger-cramp eventually get to be annoying?
...and advertising incentives which encouraged websites to steer their users towards consoles. Dirty companies destroying an industry while trying to make a fast buck (the irony is they used hardware and game developers own products to kill the industry. It's too late now, momentum is lost (along with some pretty useful spin-offs)).
An utter and complete disconnection to their consumers the way only a woman and falsified statistics can. I simply got tired of fighting with copy-protection, looking for a patch, mod or hacked exe from websites that treat me like a criminal. Use to spend 200-300 a year on games and 1000 on a new system or upgrades every few years. Now, a hard-drive every five years pretty much does it.
No intention of returning, the hobby was replaced by another whose consumer driven market places me first. Gone gone gone.
Mac sales are down there too.
It's Fall Back, right? I set my calendar back a century.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The lameness filter used to refuse to allow a post with only the text "First Post". So the various misspellings and abbreviations were born to get around it.
Random and weird software I've written.
Clearly my boycott Sony campaign is achieving results. I go on and on mercilessly to people about how they shouldn't buy Sony because of their rootkit sheanigans and their belonging to an organization that sues children and the disabled. Clearly this has somehow made it to Japan and is making a difference, at least amongst non-slashdot readers. With slashdot one day it's 'boo, Sony, for doing bad things', but next day it's 'Hooray, Sony has released a shiny new toy' (or movie or some other goody). I don't give me that line about how Sony is divided into different departments and we shouldn't penalize one section for the misdeeds of another. At the end of the day when the money is counted it's all Sony profit. Which is why the premise of the article is no big deal to Sony; if one part of their empire loses to another part of their empire, overall they haven't lost at all.
Loose lips lose spit.
The PC has evolved over the years, the old definition of what a PC was is dead, there is a new definition of a PC in modern times that is very much alive.
#1 The Intel Mac is one of the new PC definitions as it uses PC technology now.
#2 The new Amiga standard will be based on PC technology as well.
#3 The new PC need not even run Windows, it can run Linux, *BSD Unix, or any other OS that runs on it.
#4 The PC is the new Hackintosh with the OSX X86 Project to run OSX on PC systems.
#5 The Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii all use PC technology and are basically PCs by themselves if you add a keyboard and mouse to them.
#6 The iPhone and most modern cell phones are now like a PC anyway.
#7 PDAs and hand held computers are basically PCs now anyway.
#8 PCs can run emulators to run software for all different sorts of computer platforms and game consoles.
#9 PCs are used to develop software for many computer platforms.
#10 PCs can be used as dumb terminals or remote control access for any computer system.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
When H.264 hit "main stream" back in '05 i was compelled to upgrade my old system.
for people who actually use their computers as media hubs (read ME), the demand is still there for upgrades.
unfortunately the dinosaurs of media have made this natural evolution of the PC into the home legally (and are trying to make it socially) hostile.
by complying with and attempting to take advantage of the anti-competitive nature of DRM protection laws rather than lobbying against them, the pc industry is reaping what they sow.
they towed the party line instead of standing up like the CE groups did in the betamax case, and now not only are most tools to get media working on your pc illegal, but their lack of support for such activity have led to media blitzes which have embedded the idea in "sheeple" that such activity is equivalent to "theft".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Technology in Japan is expanding, from what I read a few months ago here about cellphones in Japan and Europe compared to the United States, Japan uses "mobile email" and also their phones have internet and tv (wish I had one of those). I'm assuming this was mostly targeted for desktop's but I haven't seen many "appealing" desktops from Japan (especially NEC and SONY). I don't think it included Laptops or UMPC/Tablet's which are probably on the rise for their small size. I'm not sure if Japan has "DVR" like the US or even "On Demand" channels but I'm fairly certain that Japan's HDTV market is very large, since even more programming is digital in Japan.
Now ask yourself this...Would you rather have a desktop, a laptop a tablet pc or a UMPC?
I would honestly rather have a laptop or even a tablet (a UMPC is possible depending on what it is) In the United States this hasn't happen yet because their's still a large pool of people who don't even own computers. Though I'm fairly certain here laptops are on the rise while desktops are slowing down.
Life in Japan I don't know how its like exactly but pretty sure most people only go home to sleep so having a desktop there isn't really important.
You're a student? A laptop will do that job well and pretty sure even some of their smartphones they got will be able to do some things that a laptop can do.
You're a Professional? Chances are you only use a desktop at work because thats' where all your information is, plus a laptop for mobile work, a smartphone can do email and such but it can't do everything.
Here is the big one
Gadget lovers....we like stuff to be "all-in-one" (main reason why I still haven't gotten a cellphone) and sure Japanese people are like that
*wonders if I went off a bit...*
God Of War ^^
I wish I could mod you up
From Forbes:
The Forbes article is slightly off in regards to the US price (it is actually $399.99 in the US), but there's some pretty obvious demand. At first glance the eee PC seems like a small underpowered laptop. However, the hardware is plenty to do the most common PC functions like reading emails, browsing the internet, and watching videos.
I do not think the PC market is going to diminish, but that it will change. There will be more ultra-portable devices like the eee or iphone to replace common functions of a PC. In the near future I see the desktop PC as a tool for demanding applications, but not for general home use. For example, my parents (we live in California) love it when their computer gets smaller because they only use it to write documents, check email, and browse the internet. There's no longer a need for a PC to take up as much space as it has in the past.
Maybe the Japanese don't get it. After all, they actually embraced Microsoft's MSX platform ;)
http://grog.ca/index.php?m=11&y=07&entry=entry071104-155949
Regards, Lex
If prepaid runs less then $.01/min, then shouldn't you be able to get 450 minutes a month for less then $4.50, as opposed to the $8 you stated?
There are 10 types of cliches in this world. Those that are new, and those that aren't.
But apparently not all of them. Therefore, taking into account your incomplete mastery of the syllabus, the verdict of the panel is henceforth promulgated: in Soviet Russia it fails YOU!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Okay, I've lived here in Japan off and on since 1998, and I've got a problem with this article.
The PC has never been big here. I teach university, and, seriously, I have kids who have never used a computer. Never. Not at home; not at school. I have to teach them how to open and close windows. How to click. How to type in Japanese (for whatever bizarre reason, no one uses the Japanese kana keyboard--they type in Roman characters and the computer changes them to kana, so they usually have to type 2 characters to get one).
When I first came in 1998 as a university student, the other foreign exchange students and I were mortified when we asked the university where we could connect to the internet so we could email our families to tell them we'd arrived, only to be told "Internet? We don't have that." A university with something like 15,000 students. With no internet.
"What," we asked, "you mean, not in the foreign exchange building? That's fine, we can go over to the library..."
"No, sorry. Not there either."
"Well, what about the professors? They have it don't they?"
"Some do, yes. But please don't bother them."
Finally, enough of us whined enough that they wired up two ancient Macs in the commons area. The students self-organized a waiting list to use them. They were horribly slow. The entire campus shared a single ISDN line. I gave up and just started dialing into the modem pool at my US university to quickly upload/download mail via the line-in on a pay phone.
What was the killer app that made the PC a must-have for most of the developed world? Internet, right? Well, most people in Japan had the internet on their cellphones (keitais) long before they had it at home. As a result, if you ask someone to mail you, the first thing they're going to do is tap out a message on their keitai.
But there's more to it. Of course email was the killer app for the internet in the rest of the world, but another was online shopping (in the case of the US, anyway). This has not taken off in Japan so much either. Why? Well, and this is just my new pet theory, a few days old, there is a cultural difference at play.
In the US, many of us are descendants of homesteaders and other people living in the middle of nowhere. You went to town once a month, if you had one. JC Penney, Sears, etc. were all originally what kind of company? Mail-order. You ordered your stuff via post, and then they arrived on the train. Next time you were in town, you picked it up. We have a strong mail-order cultural meme. Not so in Japan, which has basically always been urban, because most of Japan is uninhabitable (like 45-degree angles--beautiful mountains, but not so good for living on). Everyone lived and lives in the little strips of flattish land between the oceans and the mountains. So there is a strong culture of going to the shops (run by people you know) to get stuff. People--older people, especially--are very uncomfortable with ordering things they haven't seen.
Playing into the above problem is another: no customer rights. Return policies are usually not clearly stated. If you want to return something, you need to beg and convince a manager you deserve it. Worse still, the credit card is not the great deal it is in the rest of the world. In Western countries, you put purchases on a credit line with a credit card. Here, you have to pay it off at a rate you specify when you make the purchase. You don't know what bill any purchase is going to show up on, and the bill is direct-debit. Furthermore, the banks offer none of the protections we take for granted. If your card gets stolen or a database hacked, guess who pays? You. You're totally responsible for everything that happens with that card, even if it has nothing to do with you. So people don't really like using them. Personally, I try to use my US card as much as possible, because of the protections it affords.
Also, space constraints. The only thing that
Until you can download porn on the PS3, the PC's popularity is insured.
Now, the PC can get back to what it really is: a Personal Computer. For the past several years, I've whined that PC development was being misdirected and bogged down by its mainstream attention. It's difficult to expect capitalism to produce OS's, applications, and technologies for a small crowd of engineers, techies, and geeks when there are masses of consumers out there willing to shell out tons of money for half-baked, inflated, useless garbage. "Your customers tell you what business you're in" and for the past several years, the PC industry has been in the business of "protecting" the user from their computers instead of "empowering" the user with their computers. This specialization of computing power is a very good thing and it's win/win. The masses of consumers get the features and applications they were looking for in the first place without dragging down a sophisticated, technical tool to be accessible to the lowest common denominator.
Millions of smartphones etc run Linux. Way more than the laptops and servers combined.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So the US dollar has fallen 30%, but your shares have risen 10-20%? (except intel) A lot of their increased profits are due to international sales currency conversion, and nothing to do with 30% increase in sales, more like flat sales.
Japan has exported its inflation by lending out trillions at less than one percent.
When you increase your currency circulation (ie numbers in spreadsheets) by 15 - 20% yearly, eventually something is going to crack, its like legalized mass counterfeiting.
This money hasnt come from wealth generation, just a print button set to 1000000000000 copies.
You'd have to search high and low here to find a PC gaming culture, outside from MMORPGs at Internet cafes, maybe two titles from Koei (historical sims), and a whole mess of games which the US ratings board could probably safely ban based on the cover art alone. The gaming culture here is primarily console based. There are a couple of reasons for this: really lackluster effort by foreign publishers to translate games into Japanese (you can *get* Starcraft in Japan, but I hope you like playing with an English interface and a handy Japanese manual that says "This button is what you press when you want to start a new campaign"), a chicken-egg scenario with Japanese publishers, and just a general impression that the computer is a tool for word processing while the Nintendo is a tool for fun.
Thus, why would you need to upgrade to a new PC every 3 years? The old one still runs Word, browses the Internet, and sends mail. Why blow $700 on a new laptop when the same amount of money gets you a Wii and a year's worth of games or almost enough hardware to boot up a single PS3 disk?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I have never been to Japan, so I can not speak about their culture from experience, but I imagne it is similar to South Korea.
In South Korea, an average family home is a small one room apartment where people go to sleep. people don't do anything in their homes. everythng happens outside. I run into students at 11 at night who are still in their uniforms, because they haven't gone home. when they want to play games, they go to a PC bang (PC)to play their games. when they want to watch a DVD, they go to a DVD bang, when they want to check email, they use thier cellphones, which are a year ahead of what we get in North America.
there is simply no place for the desktop PC in their culture. even the laptops they have here are tiny. mini laptops with 5-7 inch screens are extreamly common. their laptops are about the same size as my first motorola brickphone!
PCs are not dead here, they are just imbedded into smaller devices that fit into their culture better. they dont have the big western homes where we go -and stay, when the work day is done.
-I only code in BASIC.-
The worst part - game updates allowing half-finished games to be released - isn't gonna happen without a hard drive. And the web browser, while gimmicky, is an optional download.
;)
Oh, and some Wiis are locked down, but not the modchipped ones.
not a meme dipshit
Exactly. Databases are another prime example. I don't care what the database is, as long as it takes a standard query (SQL) via a standard interface (ODBC). A SQL server (generic) does not need the whole WinXP or Vista baggage. It can be an appliance. It can even be an appliance using a separate network-attached storage - software becomes hardware...
I envision a protocol where the DHCP server does the security, hands out the master password tokens, so that you don't need to login and configure every device on your network. Login as God to the home router/DHCP/DNS/NAT device and you have the authority necessary to configure a newly-installed device.
Sounds like the problem is with Qwerty rather than keyboards in general. Chorded keyboards would be more appropriate and smaller.
Japan != the entire world. Given the amount of commonality much of Japanese culture presumably has with that of America and Europe at least, claiming that the PC is dying world wide because business is slow in Japan is an entirely unsupportable statement.
;)
I find it vexatious when it is assumed that the trends operating within one particular country are going to somehow magically become universal.
I for one intend to be a desktop dinosaur for as long as possible. Their architecture is a lot more transparent than that of laptops, (meaning they're a lot easier to fix or upgrade) they're a lot cheaper, and the degree of versatility I get with my desktop isn't equalled by anything else.
You might be able to play games and watch DVDs with the newest consoles; you can also do word processing with a Palm. However, you can't do word processing on a PS2, or gaming/DVDs on a handheld. If you want a machine where you can do any of those things, a PC is pretty much the only way to go. My own philosophy is that stated by Robert Heinlein, to be honest; Specialisation is for insects.
ian
Isn't that why we have wikipedia?
dual core, that would have been undreamable 5 years ago. now every laptop is powerful enough for most desktop use and pleasant to use as well since lcds don't look like garbage anymore. you even get the bonus of always having a ups with the laptop battery. add the portability and the final killer app of wifi built in on every laptop and the selling points of a desktop just rapidly diminish. and the final blow is the low prices, a laptop is now cheap whereas in the past you could only get a laptop with passable cpu speed if you bought high end. now even low end is quite usable. and for the green crowd, a laptops 30-40watt total power consumption and power suspend/resume features cannot be beat. maybe apple desktops are good with the quick suspend stuff, but many self built or other desktops fall down on this one.
The PC has never, ever been a big presence in Japanese homes. This has been common knowledge for anyone who has paid attention to Japanese culture.
They perfer their ketai (cell phones) over PCs for checking email. It's why there are so many Hello Kitty cell phone accessories. (not that I've looked or own any.)
Perhaps fostering innovation rather than inhibiting it would bolster the market.
For example, by way of rhetorical questions, why is there not a desktop computer based on the cell processor yet and why has Sony locked down access to the PS3 graphics processor?
640GB should be enough for anyone... in Japan
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra