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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?
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
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)
Depends on your definition of "PC" and "Mainframe." All those little devices *are* PCs (and are more powerful than the mainframes of the past!). The only difference is form factor. The "box on a desk" home computer may very well decline (I don't think it'll die any time soon, at least not for geeks). The "fridge-sized cabinets" sitting in datacenters feeding content to the desktop computers and mobile devices won't be going anywhere soon. If history has taught us anything, the more powerful mainframe-class computing becomes, the more stuff we find to throw at it.
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.