People Afraid of Losing Their Jobs Buy Fewer PCs
by John Paczkowski
Posted on January 15, 2009 at 10:30 AM PT
According to market-research outfits Gartner and IDC, PC shipment growth in the fourth quarter of 2008 was the worst since 2002. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker shows global PC shipments down 0.4 percent year over year. So much for that annual holiday season uptick.
As expected, demand for PCs in the U.S. faced a challenging environment, with a substantial reduction in spending among both consumer and commercial segments amid tightening credit, eroding confidence, and growing unemployment. Not only unit growth was constrained, “but the value of the market also shrank as a result of competitive pricing and the introduction of lower-priced mini notebooks,” said IDC analyst Doug Bell. “Unfortunately, the first half of 2009 looks pretty shaky as the economic fundamentals need to recover before spending on PCs will resume.”
Gartner’s assessment of the quarter was slightly more upbeat, but nothing to celebrate. Fourth-quarter PC shipments worldwide rose 1.1 percent. That’s something. But it also represents the worst growth rate since 2002.
“The fourth quarter started out with a relatively optimistic view, but then it got worse every month,” Gartner analyst Mika Kitagawa explained. “In the fourth quarter, U.S. businesses quickly cut IT spending with public sectors, including some government and education buyers, postponing PC procurement due to budget crisis concerns. PC vendors focused on the professional market were especially hit by the weakening market conditions.”
Ya don’t say….
A few other bullet points worth noting here:
- Apple’s (AAPL) share of the U.S. computer market fell to eight percent during the fourth calendar quarter of 2008 from 9.5 percent, thanks to Acer apparently.
- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) remains the top PC vendor worldwide, with 19.1 percent market share. Dell (DELL) is second with 13.2 percent–down a full percentage point from last year.
Comments
Excluding the new meme that in six months we will all be either alive or dead depending on the success of our back-yard garden, I’m optimistic that the future holds a much wider penetration of “PCs” into our lives than did the past.
The past held that a PC was a device that contained an Intel chip, or a look-alike chip from a company on the edge of bankruptcy. The PC would have to run Windows, and a greater part of the profit for the total package would go to the company that took the least risk in producing it.
Adam Smith-style smart shoppers would have put an end to this nonsense a lot sooner, but every day we learn the game was even more rigged than we thought.
Apple has carved a big slice out of that old game, and embedded devices that are totally invisible to the user have been the thousand cuts turning the giants legs into hamburger. UH OH, crazy metaphor alert!
Instead of debating the death of the dekstop, I think the future will consist of desktops, beefy laptops, netbooks, and embedded devices from companies we’ve never heard of and more and more they will all inter operate thanks to the wide acceptance of standards rather than duopoly back-door dealings. These gadgets will be dirt-cheap by comparison with the past, integrated as $5 add-ons to many devices and at some point I would expect to pay more for a nice big monitor than for the device it plugs into.
Our bad times may be the birthplace of much that does a job and does it well by necessity rather than marketing gimmicks.
Let’s hope.
Posted by Mac Beach at January 15th, 2009 at 12:56 pm