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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe that whiz-bang cellphones would do as good in the USA as they would in Asia. Asia is much more gadget-oriented than Americans are, not to say there would be no market, just not a strong market.
Gone!
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.
...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.
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.
Until you can download porn on the PS3, the PC's popularity is insured.