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back to article Europe PC sales sagged in 2008

PC sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa grew just 1.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008 as the economic crisis began to bite. Stefania Lorenz, director at IDC, said: "The worldwide financial and credit crisis has hit the largest markets in Central and Eastern Europe [CEE], causing the PC market to contract, by 23.8 …

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  1. Paul Murphy

    Growth <> Profit

    Why are people hung up on growth?

    Isn't it enough to be making a profit?

    Even if growth falls it doesn't mean that the business isn't making a profit.

    It makes me rather annoyed that people get laid off because the company isn't making quite as much money as they thought they would. People losing their jobs take quite a while to get back to where they were, and in the meantime aren't buying goods, so fears of a recession turn into a reality because of 'shareholders expectations' when the shareholders should know that they are not necessarily going to be getting any money in the first place.

    If I had my way no redundancies would be allowed if the company was making a profit.

    ttfn

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    and again

    i say I try to buy a new computer and Lo and behold i cant even get a three year credit on £1500 cause i have 3 dependants !

    Its not exactly a large amount of money and i have never not paid anything back I have a OD of £500

    That is the main reason for the lack in buying

    If the banks did carry on with small loans it would solve alot of problems

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  3. Goatan

    RE: Growth <> Profit

    I agree!

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  4. breakfast Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Core, fancy that

    I think part of the problem is that nobody is making faster chips any more. I mean, sure, there are clever things going on with multiple cores and whathaveyou, but who is writing code that makes the most of multi-core technology? Will it make my browser play videos faster? Will it make Word better behaved? How would a chip with more cores on it affect the average user?

    When people were wondering about moving from a 486 to a Pentium that was pretty clear, but to me at least it seems a lot less so now, which gives most people no compelling reason to upgrade.

    Also I guess among home buyers games were quite a big driver towards getting high performance PCs and now most games look pretty good on consoles and the majority of PC games are half-assed console ports anyways perhaps that incentive has dissipated somewhat.

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  5. Fab De Marco

    Joe public's need has hit a plateau

    This is the exact reason why netbooks are popular, the average joe will use his PC to surf the net, send email and possibly write up some word docs. You do not need more than one core to do this. So people look at the decision to buy a new PC, realise that the one they've got is doing a fine job and so keep the money in their pocket.

    Whereas before a P3 would struggle to run XP effectively an upgrade would be needed; any P4 would be fine running XP and the computer will live a long and happy life.

    The bad rep that vista got didn't help the market either as people would steer clear of it and wouldn't know why.

    The only people that would need to buy new PC's are hardcore gamers and people that do heavy duty video/graphics processing. The latter will probably buy a PC all inclusive. But the hardcore gamers will probably upgrade their PC in dribs and drabs, a Graphics card here, a bit of RAM there. and when they can upgrade no more, will they jump on the dell or HP website for their replacement??? No, they will buy the bits and build their own PC.

    The netbook is the way forward for most people, and because of this the price of them will go up.

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  6. Mark

    re: Growth <> Profit

    Because shareholders want the share prices to go up all the time. They are no longer investors in the company. They are investors in the stock market. They want the stock price to go up all the time so that they can sell at a profit to another punter.

    And for that to happen, you must increase profits all the time.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We need more cores, bigger cores

    Good old parallel computing that is what we want, when do we want it, we want it now!

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  8. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Growth and Profit

    It is profit that ups the share value for the stockholders.

    It is growth that ensures that the profits will still keep rolling in the year after.

    Because the capitalist economy matra is "grow or die".

    Stagnation is not acceptable because while you stagnate, a competitor is growing. So either you grow, or your competitor does - and if he grows, he steals market share from you and your profits will shrink.

    Both notions are thus closely related - until the day people will accept that they do not need "more" market share and the competition doesn't try to stomp they out with extreme prejudice.

    The words "share and share alike" are totally unknown in our economy.

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  9. breakfast Silver badge
    Boffin

    @We need more cores, bigger cores

    As a programmer, the problem with parallel computing is that you don't always know what order things are going to happen, which a totally requires way of thinking different because arrive one thing before may another.

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