It Was Flat Sales That Helped Microsoft Become America's #5 PC Maker (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Microsoft was the fifth-biggest PC maker in the U.S. in the third quarter of this year, according to industry advisory firm Gartner. The top spot in the U.S. belongs to HP, with about 4.5 million machines sold, ahead of Dell at 3.8 million, Lenovo at 2.3 million, and Apple at 2 million. The gap between fourth and fifth is pretty big -- Microsoft sold only 0.6 million Surface devices last quarter -- but it suggests that Microsoft's PC division is heading in the right direction, with sales 1.9 percent higher than the same quarter last year. The company pushed down to sixth place was Acer. The current quarter should be better still; the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Studio have all been given hardware refreshes which, when combined with the always-busy holiday season, should stimulate higher sales.

Globally, both Gartner and IDC reported a flat PC market (up 0.1 percent in Gartner's view, down 0.9 percent in IDC's), after the previous quarter's modest growth.
"The PC market continued to be driven by steady corporate PC demand, which was driven by Windows 10 PC hardware upgrades," said one Gartner analyst.

In defining what constitutes a PC, Gartner includes notebooks and "premium" ultramobile devices -- but does not include iPads or Chromebooks.

Comments

What will drive the next refresh?

[Bite The Pillow]

New Windows versions have dictated hardware refresh up to now. With Windows 10 being the last version, there's no line in the sand. Hardware is good enough. You don't need faster at this point, the bottlenecks are external. Especially office work.

They are going to have to make software even more bloated to encourage hardware buys, or expect that division to suffer.

Re:What will drive the next refresh?

[e432776]

I might add that not just Windows but a lot of software seemed to need new hardware to run well a couple of decades ago. Today it does seem that older hardware, even from 5 yrs ago, is good enough. This used to be pretty unimaginable. I don't know if the slowing rate of improvements on the hardware side is diving this or is just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the price of PCs is increasing. This makes sense also, someone else commented that computers are becoming more like durable goods such as a car. If you will have the same unit for a long time, then it makes more sense to get a "premium" one, compared with if you were going to have to replace every couple of years.

In many ways this is a positive- at least from the environmental perspective and in terms of our having quality hardware being designed and available. More OT, I think Microsoft did a lot to push the PC HW business to higher quality, though the down side seems to be that they also follow Apple's habit of producing hard-to-repair, glued together, machines.

How come?

[sanf780]

I wonder about how Microsoft ended up selling so many Surface thingies. Most everybody hated the manufacturing quality of Surface Pro 4. Botched firmware updates happened too, like the one this week that disables the touch screen and for which you need to send your computer for repairs. What did the other companies do that let Microsoft take 5th position?

Re:Excluding Chromebooks

[b0s0z0ku]

Only those that can run a good amount of local apps. Many Chromebooks are just glorified WebTVs. No room to save locally, no control over local apps == no privacy, Scroogle controls everything. Ta hell with that model.

stop selling OS for non microsoft hardware

[goombah99]

Microsoft could stop selling their operating system for non-microsoft computers. Just like google and apple do.

Microsoft computers, like google computers, are not built by microsoft. I suppose one could argue apple doesn't build there's either but they do design and integrate them themselves.

Or they could just go exclusive and only support HP or Lenovo.

THat would definitely drive the upgrade cycle.

Re:stop selling OS for non microsoft hardware

[fyzikapan]

What? Both ChromeOS and Android are widely available on non-Google hardware.

Misleading

[Tough Love]

The dup article touts Microsoft's US PC sales once again, overlooking the fact that Microsoft's miserable 600k worldwide PC sales are less than one sixth of Acer's worldwide PC sales. WTF.

With 1% annual growth rate the technical term for Microsoft's PC effort is "vanity project". Looks like the spin department is desperately feeding the media to try to keep it on life support.