IDC: Trying to flog PCs? It's not going to happen Market analyst IDC now expects fewer PCs will be sold in 2012 than it had earlier predicted. The box-counter has also revised down its estimate for PC sales over the next four years. The world-wide PC market for desktops and portables will grow just 0.9 per cent during 2012, 367 million units, as mid-year shipments slow down, …
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Consumer sentiment could be revived with UltraBook or Ultrathin systems provided the right price is reached. More price-cutting in the Android tablet landscape could free up some budget for PC purchases, but could also focus consumers on tablets rather than PCs. Ultimately, we expect modest PC growth this year as the industry works through the transition to Win8 and related devices."
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We have been waiting for quite some time for the price of UltraBooks/Thins to drop in price : It's just not happening and I do not believe that W8 is going to change that situation. Keyword = Recession.
Cheaper Android tablets will not free up money for PCs although it might free up money for Food and Petrol.
The industry has not yet "felt" what W8 truly has to offer, if anything at all. Industry does not buy PCs because of operating systems....... It buys PCs because of the software that runs on them, there is a major difference between the two.
Lets see...if the big USP of W8 is the touch interface, then surely everyone is waiting for the manufacturers to release a PC which actually has a touchscreen?
I know some are available now, but Joe Punter doesn't care...all he knows is that with the W8 sticker on the front, he "knows" his future W8 PC will have a touchscreen...
...won't it?
And thus the whole EPIC FAIL of METRO and W8 strategy is revealed...
"But the new Windows 8 UI could help rob suppliers of the usual post-Windows-launch sales spike as consumers struggle with the new interface."
Yeah, because typical consumers are always diving down to the 'Start' menu to find the programs they want aren't they? In my experience most never do anything outside their browser of choice.
3 out of 5 consumers in my household never use the Start button at all!
And even as a techie myself I can count the number of times I head to that button each day on my nose.
The only people the new UI affects adversely are the stuck-in-the-mud techies.
Yes, we all know all MS really did was remove that pesky start button, nothing else changed at all...
The quality of fanbois comment has declined far below 'pathetically out of touch with reality' well before Win8 even launches.
Power users are going to just bypass all the new crap while subconsciously downgrading support for MS products. Ordinary and new users are going to wonder WTF just happened when Win8 switches UI modes, wonder WTF the controls are hidden in Metro. The missing Start menu will be the least of their worries.
"Yes, we all know all MS really did was remove that pesky start button, nothing else changed at all..."
Duh! Of course I know they've changed lots of stuff (especially under-the-hood) but all the supposed techies here seem to care about is that Start button which is why I restricted my comment to that.
I dual boot Win 8 RTM and Mountain Lion Hackinstosh, and I really have no love for Win8 at all. On dual screens it makes hitting the top right corner to go to control panel/shutdown stupidly difficult and fiddly without accidentally going onto the next screen. Every program which wants to install stuff vomits all its useless bits onto the start screen. If I have to use Windows, as soon as I boot up, I click on desktop and just use that where possible. I never ever use the start screen otherwise, it is just superfluous for most things and all the programs on it have a different look and feel to all their desktop equivalents, very confusing... Is it an improvement on Windows 7 for a normal desktop pc? Nope. Luckily, most of my windows dev work can be done through Virtual Environments, so it can happily be done under Mountain Lion. Problem sorted :) Perhaps on a Windows Tablet it might be good, but I already have iPads so probably won't be getting one.
The PC market is in permanent slow decline. Tablets will take the place of PCs for a large number of people with simple needs (email, facebook and browsing) who formerly had no choice but to get a PC to serve these needs. You know, the people who bought their first PC so they could use those free CDs that AOL kept mailing out. They will also replace some PCs in multi-PC households. Tablets are more portable than even the lightest Ultrabook, less prone (at least today) to malware, and being simpler in their functionality are also more user friendly in their operation.
Tablets don't replace PCs for the types of people who read the Reg, but they do for the types of people who closely follow the latest celebrity gossip.
It's just my opinion but fondle slabs are just one component of the larger computational echo system. PC's, notebooks, tablets and smaller hand-held computing devices all have a place in it. None of these can replace the other completely, each has a purpose that the other devices can't service quite as well. We are just witnessing each finding it's place in this balance. The only thing that would ruin this balance is MS's decision to exterminate the PC from the echo system by poisoning PC's with Windows 8. Of course this loss from the overall balance does not make for a sunny outlook in the box counter's futures.
Well, Apple make nice looking devices which hold their value unlike the typical bargain basement pc equivalent but I digress. MS's big push to change the whole way of interacting with Windows is going to backfire spectacularly, I can safely say, having used 8 for a while. Business hates it, and end-users are baffled by it once they get over the pretty colours. One woman we tested with started crying because of her frustration that she just didn't know how to operate it and found it utterly intimidating. Needless to say we put Windows 7 back on her PC as fast as humanly possible. Do they honestly think that people use Windows because they like it?!? They use it because it is compatible and that is what they have learned to use or have been told to use. If you are going to learn a completely new user interface, It's much easier to learn OS X...which is at least consistent. On Windows 8 clicking on IE on the Start screen starts a different App to clicking IE on the desktop, and the same goes for control panel. For me it is unintuitive and annoying. For an end user, it might make them give up on MS altogether. Perhaps that is Steve Ballmer's unwritten objective.
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