PC sales plunge, Microsoft and Windows 8 blamed
blogs.seattletimes.com
blogs.seattletimes.com
I'll tell you why PC sales are declining, because PC's are no longer our sole means of downloading, playing games, reading news or running apps. Mobile phones and tablets are to blame for the drop in PC sales, this isn't a bad thing and the PC isn't all of a sudden going to disappear because a PC will always serve a purpose. Sounds like a consulting firm trying to sound insightful and draw comparisons that shouldn't be drawn.
I actually like the look of Metro and how it works on a tablet, but Microsoft forcing desktop users down this path is not going to work.
If Windows 8 is seen as worse or no better than Win7 , why bother upgrading?
More so, while PC sales in general are also under assault from competing devices (like tablets and smartphones), that actually raises the importance of the desirability of the current version of Windows. It's when sales are weak and competition is strong that the effects of an undesirable OS are most pronounced.
Also, PCs certainly aren't going to "disappear" but the rate at which new PCs are purchased, especially in the near term, and the total size of the PC market is still up in the air, by a huge margin and perhaps even by an order of magnitude.
But as a human, what I hate legitimately and with a passion is having the "Mobile Web 3.0" paradigm being forced onto me with the Windows Market. Keeping games on a "real time" platform like Steam is one thing, but having my actual data in the cloud is not at all a comforting feeling. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I know that data is going to be mined for usage patterns and other valuable data that will ultimately be used to corral and control me. Features that cost money to support will be hidden behind deep menus and dialogs, affecting my productivity because their motivations are now skewed. Products they want to push are now right in my face and they know how much time I look at them, and by aggregate patterns, how to make it more "effective" i.e. annoying.
It's another bubble; There is a few applications that do benefit from this paradigm but unless it is managed very carefully, the temptation to extract my value for their own usage as a kind of user tax will always be there. The observer effect is not confined to quantum particles, it manifests up to observable macro phenomenon. While my incentive for taking a certain action may be fuzzy, it becomes binary when measured and leads to annoying false conclusions, a la clippy.
I don't really blame Microsoft and their solution is probably the best. I can't certainly think of anything better than hiding it on the right hand side, but it's still there, like a shadow hanging over the OS, waiting to slurp up less-wary users into its world, where I'll have to travel if I don't want to be left behind. If it is really as insidious as I imagine, they'll just die off as the machine leeches the life from them and we can all move along learning from the failed experiment. But chances are the machine will nurture its little human cells and use them to stomp out and consume anything that isn't it.
On a related note, am I right in thinking that we are currently in the longest ever gap between new HD capacities? 4TB has been the top size for two years now.
I realize that a new machine might be a bit faster - but, this current computer has been so rock for the last couple years - I haven't had a blue screen/lockup in 3+ years - that I don't want to mess with anything.
So - I totally agree with you, one of the reasons why Desktop Sales might start to drop, is that for the average office worker, right around 2004/2005, Desktops got "Good Enough" that you really don't need to upgrade.
When Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP, we might see another round of system purchases though.
I'm tempted by the floating point performance of the newer chips but for normal uses (LibreOffice Web &c) no problems.
I did a speed comparison against someone who bought their's recently, and their's was only marginally faster.
Most computers nowadays have more horse power than most people need for all their common task, upgrading offers little to no advantage for most and as such is a waste of dwindling disposable income.
Not saying it's a bad idea mind you, it's just another factor to take into consideration.
Agreed re: most users not requiring a high end quad core CPU to browse the net, listen to music, use an email client, etc.
Those cores do come in handy with virtual machines, however. With hyper threading your quad core turns into 8 virtual cores, which can then be dedicated to, and shared amongst, VMs -- very handy as a Linux user needing to test various flavors of Windows without requiring separate physical machines.
SSDs everyone benefits from, novice or advanced user, a useful upgrade (short of storage space of course). RAM, better too much than too little, 8GB with Windows 8 is probably a safe baseline.
and Windows 8 intro screen is a bit baffling at first, a bit like Gnome 3's WTF do I do, is there something wrong intro screen.
I do love the fact that you can build a decent server with consumer grade products, I can deliver low cost servers for my customers using an i7 and setup remote desktop services. The extra cores are great for such uses, but the masses will probably never need that much power, especially when you add an SSD to the mix. The PC market is mature, unless something drastically changes sales are going to stay flat.
My parents are still using my old desktop from 2001 (AMD K7) for their office + web stuff.
Not sure about other systems.
However, since I built the PC myself, I could choose what OS to install, and I'm using Linux and Win7. If I was a more regular user, I'd be forced to use Win8 - and if that was the case, I would not have upgraded. If this is true for other users, then it's clear to me that Windows 8 really is to blame here. I would certainly not purchase a computer running Windows 8 for desktop work, and I believe a majority of desktop users agree with me.
for you. I doubt that "compiles much faster" or "allows more programs open at a time" would be marketing slogans that sell zillions of PCs. 'Normal' users run a web browser, maybe an email program, and Wordpad (I am not even sure that is an exaggeration, nowadays)
Also, about the SSD: in my limited experience, the only thing it really speeds up is boot time (shutdown of my iMac now takes ages, relatively speaking). Launching programs probably doubles in speed, too, but it already was fast enough for me. If you are compiling C/C++ or launching a VM zillions of times a day the difference will be huge, too, but [see above]
What's the problem? Is the new start menu really that scary? I spend more time tweaking a new Windows 7 installation than I ever will on Windows 8.
I think this is only one factor that's problematic for Win8. Another is that it now as a touch-first OS, looks and feels like it is competing with the iPad. So perversely, MS may have opened themselves to even worse competition with tablets because they have conflated the desktop and tablet ecosystems together. Instead of people buying a laptop when they need laptop and a tablet when they need a tablet, MS seems to be saying "Hey, you think you need a laptop, but maybe you actually need a tablet?". This is so confusing. People don't know what Windows really is any more. So they either wait, or they buy the less confusing option, which turns out to be the tablet.
The closest I have seen to what I want is the ASUS u500vz which has a decent mobile GPU, but it's extremely hard to get hold of (at least in my country).
It's kind of like what would happen to Porsche / BMW / Mercedes-Benz if a car maker came along that offered an electric sports car for $20K that performed like their $70K offerings. No one wants to buy a $50K BMW that performs worse than a $20K electric car...that's easy to understand. Unfortunately, these PC makers haven't grasped this concept...which says a lot about them; they are too intent on preserving their price structure (that overpriced upgrade to a SSD) to realize that they need to spec them in standard, or they will collapse (their company will shed stock). The nature of the game has changed, but they're still worshiping Jobs and picking over his final words for any hidden meanings to guide them to profitability. Yesh.
I mean seriously, Ultrabooks? "Oh yeah, we'll just copy the MacBook Air, and BAM! Profit!" Because that's what consumers want...a more expensive, less useful version of a laptop. Only now that the Jobs reality distortion field is fading are we seeing people wake up, and wonder whether they really want an iPhone 6.
Anyone done research on how much storage is actually used? I've never filled a hard drive yet but I'm old school with music.
There are a couple of reasons why PC sales are declining: 1. Speed per CORE isn't dramatically improving and most users only really need 1 or 2 cores 2. Hardware is very expensive for top line components in comparison to 10 years ago 3. Every 2 years a new chip set comes out that requires you to replace your mobo (and possibly your ram) if you want to upgrade your CPU - in conjunction with that, a lot of software is getting bound to a machine - meaning that if you replace your motherboard you have to re-license your software - ex. Windows which turns a previously relatively cheap process (ex. replacing a cpu) into a very expensive process (replace cpu, mobo, ram, software). 4. Hardware intensive applications ex. games, some software; require top of the line hardware that requires you to spend $1500 - $3000 from scratch vs. $150 - $300 for a console - in my opinion that makes a PC undesirable. The word 'recession' has been hanging in the air since 2008.
I'm still using a 5 year old 2.2Ghz AMD quad core at home. I'm saving up for a new machine to last me a couple of years but the pricing is quite steep - about $5500. The only reason why I'm willing to justify that amount is because 1.it speeds up the rate at which I can do freelance/consultative work and directly affects my rates 2. I am a gamer 3. I sometimes need to work overtime from home. On a funny note; someone suggested I buy a car instead because its value would depreciate slower!
When I needed to do IOS development I decided to look at buying a Mac Book Pro recently, rather than go with a new model, I bought one off ebay that had a 3 year warranty, upgraded the ram to 16GB (overkill) and put in an SSD for less than buying a new MBP.
So when people start moaning about how they need to upgrade their slow laptop/pc, as long as the machine is at least core 2 duo (64 bit), I end up recommending they get an SSD and more memory.
For the £150 investment they walk away extremely happy for the next 5 years.
I think it has really sped up the process of people willing to go for other products even if they're not familiar with it.
Microsoft have pushed themselves to the bottom of that list.
I don't think so. Not unless business decides it wants random coloured squares combined with mad inefficiency...
In the last years I never heard anybody saying "I bought a new PC and it's great" but rather "I got screwed buying a new PC".
Lenovo, Dell, HP! WHY U NO BUILD GOOD PCs ANYMORE?
In particular, I find it interesting that XP hung on so long and was the one that MS started its Geniune Advantage program with. I suspect it's the first one that many people paid for (to shut up GA) and they felt more ownership of, and commitment to, making it a harder sell for them to upgrade. For better or worse, in earlier years, Microsoft did not really prioritize copyright enforcement as much as they do today. In fact, Gates is on record over this. In 2007, Bill Gates said in Fortune Magazine "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not." A year earlier he said "as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." (LA Times) I think the strong change from the lax enforcement approach in the late 90s and early 2000s (before the XP GA stuff) is a major source of Microsoft's decline in sales. Their OS sales 15 years ago, IMHO, benefited greatly from social effects and word of mouth. I'm sure I'll get some flack for that sentiment, but they deliberately worked to eliminated that effect and now people, at their request, are treating software more like a valuable asset -- and hanging onto what they bought for much longer.
It doesn't help that Vista was poorly received, nor does it help that tablets are filling a lot of the appliance use-cases (video chat, YouTube - another nightmare for copyright - and pocket gaming), and it certainly doesn't help that Windows 8 is also launching like a lead balloon. People never like change. But tablets are still benefiting from the "cool new thing" network effect that has largely left PCs over the past decade, usurped largely by Apple, proving that it hasn't gone away.
People aren't interested in having a better PC than their neighbor any more though because, due largely to copyright enforcement and DRM, they feel less welcomed/excited by the PC+Internet environment and, to top it off, they are already putting their "bling" money into tablets smartphones, etc.
The last time PC sales tanked like this was in 2001, after the IT bubble burst (interestingly, Napster was shut down in July 2001). If we ignore that as an oddball (but one that's consistent with my assertion), from the early 90s to the time of Genuine Advantage, things were lined up very well for the PC market to see strong growth: copyright law was ambiguous or unenforced, and people were actually enjoying buying PCs because they could do new/exciting things every day (music, movies, games, and sharing over the internet) in spite of the specter of copyright litigation. Furthermore, desktops and laptops (full systems, allowing even the OS to change) were the only game in town - so it was the thing being talked about around the water cooler (today it's the tablet, etc).
1) The last generation of computers that people already own (Intel i3/5/7 with Windows 7) is actually pretty damn good and covers most requirements perfectly well. In fact my 5 year old Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz ThinkPad T61 with a Samsung 840 Pro SSD is really fast to the point I have no plans to upgrade any time soon. I see people hanging on to these sorts of PCs now because they are the first generation to work pretty flawlessly, ever. People hang on to stuff that works and I don't blame them for doing that. Businesses do the same and to be honest, with some heel dragging, they're good until Windows 7 EOL in 2020.
2) Windows 8 is just horrible. I've tried it several times at different points of time on different machines ranging from laptop to desktop to touchscreen desktop and the usability has just completely gone out of the window. It doesn't work on a laptop and doesn't work on a desktop in any adequate way. It physically hurts you if you have to use it on a touch screen desktop either through mouse hoop jumping or aching arms. New device paradigms are being pushed but they all feel awkward and a bit Heath Robinson. I do think they got Windows Phone pretty spot on but that experience doesn't scale up to larger devices well.
3) Consumers used to drive a big chunk of sales, but this has been relatively scuppered by other vendor's consumption devices such as tablets and smart phones.
Actually I think this is a very good point. I've always seen people replacing their Windows machines just because they are 'slow' or 'not working' which could probably easily be solved just by reinstalling Windows. Windows 7 is a lot harder to break in this respect compared to previous versions, so I guess people just don't see the need.