PC: Dead Like Me...

Three months ago, Wasabi printed an article, ” PC Market: The ICE... is gonna BREAK!” and boy did we get backlash, especially from the gamer community, who felt that their high power PCs, required to render and play some of the more sophisticated FPS games, were never going away.  However, although we empathize with the gamer enthusiasts, the player community’s patronage will not be enough to stay the tide of change. 

 

We are not alone anymore in our opinion, for Gartner has chimed in with a similar opinion, and they are slow to move when pontificating about the future, a little too slow in our opinion to be any use, but nevertheless, better late than never.

 

Gartner Monday reported that fourth quarter shipments of personal computers were nearly 5% less than in the same period last year.  "Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by cannibalizing PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "Whereas once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC," she added. 

People who have both a PC and a tablet will be the exception, not the norm, according to Kitagawa.  

"Therefore, we hypothesize that buyers will not replace secondary PCs in the household, instead allowing them to age out [and then] shifting consumption to a tablet,".

- Gartner

For the past year or so, a combination of a bad economy and the dramatic growth of tablets and Smartphone’s have hammered PC sales. When people have enough money to buy a computer, they spent it on a tablet instead of a laptop, Kitagawa said.  She continued, “Worldwide PC shipments were flat this past quarter, just like they were for the previous six quarters before that. PC shipments globally totaled 87.5 million units in the second quarter of 2012. That is a decline of 0.1% from the second quarter of the previous year. In the second quarter of 2012, the PC market suffered through its seventh consecutive quarter of flat to single-digit growth,"

Other research firms agree. Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, said he expects tablets and Smartphone’s to continue to punish the PC industry. "This is a generational change," he said. "This isn't a temporary phenomenon. PCs are great for information creation, where tablets and Smartphone’s are better for information consumption and we're mainly consumers, not creators."

So Wasabi, as we stated before, we certainly empathize with the folks that are clinging on to the old form factor, the “PC”; however, as we said in our article three months ago, the PC Market’s real issue is not environmental, economic, or even logistics; it’s cultural, in a word, “iPad”.   So remember, Wasabi said it first, if something doesn't change, all we can say is, "Rest in PC".

Source(s):

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229021/Tablets_smartphones_still_hammering_PC_market

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 20 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 333-8394 x 689