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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.
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 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'?
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.
Your powers of deduction are teh pwnage young one.
which is totally what she said
(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.
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."
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.
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..
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 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
Until you can download porn on the PS3, the PC's popularity is insured.
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.