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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.""
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
While I'd love a small pc that had true notebook capability with me at all times, the last thing I want to do is be further shafted by a phone service provider. And in 20 years of owning cellphones in a variety of countries, I can safely safe that there is not one occasion where I have not, to some degree, been shafted by a phone service provider. I have two university degrees, one in numerate sciences, but I struggle to understand how the numbers on any cellphone contract add up.
The only way I'm owning a smartphone is if someone else is paying -- or there is a revolution in global regulation that strips the asshole cartel-like phone companies of all their power.
I'm sure the only significant barrier to smartphone adoption is the criminals that operate the phone companies.
(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.
Personally, I think the article is about the Japanese market. They live in smaller spaces and don't have the room for a 'workstation' sized computer on it's own desk. Further, I can remember that historically, the Japanese have always had a crippled PC market, going back to the days of the NEC hard drive cartel, when no self-respecting patriotic Japanese would have anything but a large, expensive, unreliable NEC hard drive; it was considered disloyal to have a small reliable inexpensive Seagate. The Japanese have always had fewer and more compromised PCs. Remember, game consoles also are more popular in Japan than PC Gaming.
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
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.
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.
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