Windows 8 has put the world's PC market to sleep - IDC The global PC market is dwindling, and Windows 8 could be to blame, according to the beancounters at IDC. The analyst firm released its rundown of global PC shipments on Tuesday, and the year-on-year double digit decline blows a cold wind for traditional PC makers like Dell and HP, and OS-slinger Microsoft. "It seems clear …
I doubt it means much. I bought a $15 upgrade in that offer, but I don't use it. It's installed on a VM we created to show customers what it looks like, and we've not logged into it for over 2 weeks now.
Plus, all those laptops still coming with Windows 7 preinstalled actually have a Windows 8 Pro license, and MS will tell you how successful Windows 8 is because of these.
I wanted to play world of tanks at a reasonable framerate, so I considered buying a new pc (the first for a good number of years). Oh dear, everything has win8 on it. Instead, I said 'sod it', sellotaped a new motherboard and graphics card into an old case and installed Vista on it because I had a Vista license kicking around.
A £1000 shiny new machine sale turned into £500 carrier bag of parts.
You where ripped of! Massively!
For 500pounds (actually: 599€, close enough) I can buy a Lenovo H520 with 8GB, core i5 and 2GB GeForce® GT640 at the local Saturn (and that is NOT the cheapest shop around!)
And if you absolutely insist on keeping with Win7 - Lenovo offers a downgrade option
We're showing customers the Windows 8 start menu before finalising sales of new PCs - in most cases the response is along the lines of "ugh yuck" or "so how are you supposed to <insert commonly done task>".
And then they ask if we can still sell them Windows 7 (thankfully yes).
And one of the few customers that bought a Win8 box managed to wipe everything we'd put on it for him (including his old data) because Windows offered to "refresh" his PC when it BSODed (he installed a dodgy driver for a USB device he had at home). Well done Microsoft - why not just make "Format C:" one of the boot options in Windows 9?
The bean counters at IDC should stick to counting beans, something they may be good at, because they don't understand the computer business.
The decline in computer sales began long before the introduction of Windows 8. Laptops expanded their market greatly, stealing market share from desktop computers, and then tablets came along and stole share from laptops. The decline has accelerated as more tablets have become available, probably aided by a global economic slowdown. To suggest that Windows 8 has caused all these effects is myopic, to say the least.
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