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The Dying PC Market
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Nov 04, 2007 09:06 AM
from the netcraft-confirms-nothing dept.
from the netcraft-confirms-nothing dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, digital video recorders with terabytes of memory
NEC's annual PC shipments in Japan shrank 6.2 percent to 2.72 million units in 2006, and the trend is continuing into the first quarter of fiscal 2007 with a 14 percent decline from a year earlier. Sony's PC shipments for Japan shrank 10 percent in 2006 from a year earlier.
"The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones," said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.
"Consumers aren't impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That's not as exciting as a bigger TV," Katayama said. "And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright.""
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Submission: The dying PC market ? by Anonymous Coward
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Yeah, well (Score:5, Insightful)
None of those could exist without the PC.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, well (Score:5, Insightful)
So if we have a dedicated games device at home, and a mobile phone that can browse the web and access e-mail then that's most of the technology the average punter will want/need.
Of course I expect most slashdot readers to still want their PCs..
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Re:Yeah, well (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Personal computers will always exist and if this article proves anything it proves that PCs are consuming other markets than just surfing the net or downloading porn. Just because they are expanding into other markets that were analogue doesn't mean they are going to disappear.
A TV with a user interface is pretty much a PC.
Re:Yeah, well (Score:5, Informative)
While I'd love a small pc that had true notebook capability with me at all times, the last thing I want to do is be further shafted by a phone service provider. And in 20 years of owning cellphones in a variety of countries, I can safely safe that there is not one occasion where I have not, to some degree, been shafted by a phone service provider. I have two university degrees, one in numerate sciences, but I struggle to understand how the numbers on any cellphone contract add up.
The only way I'm owning a smartphone is if someone else is paying -- or there is a revolution in global regulation that strips the asshole cartel-like phone companies of all their power.
I'm sure the only significant barrier to smartphone adoption is the criminals that operate the phone companies.
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Re:Yeah, well (Score:5, Funny)
Your problem is that you have the wrong degrees. If you had an MBA, it would all make sense. Especially if you used Excel.
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The only barrier is your mind (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?cPath=66_68 [sparkfun.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's achievable - eyeglass monitors or Head mounted displays [ucf.edu]
And a full keyboard and a mouse.
For flat surfaces:
http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/images/virtual-laser-keyboard-hand.jpg [slashdot.org]
Alternatively:
Senseboard - which doesn't project a keyboard at all [senseboard.com]
or
Lightweight eyetracker [qinetiq.com] with any number of On screen keyboards [google.com]
Re:Yeah, well (Score:5, Insightful)
In part I agree, but I think there's another facet of the issue that they are overlooking.
The PC market is effectively saturated.
The need to upgrade your PC every 2 years to keep up with the software is passed. The only exception today is Vista and it's poorer than expected market penetration to date bears witness to the fact that people don't see the features available in Vista as merit for a new machine. We've reached a phase of good enough where computers can easily last 4-5 years in the technology curve without being painfully obsolete.
During the 1990's by the time the new computer you ordered was shipped to your house it was already being superceded by a newer model. And the software was moving almost as fast. Quickly what ran Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 couldn't hack Office 97 or Windows 98. It definitely couldn't manage Windows NT 4. The gaming video scene was even worse. Today there really isn't sufficient customer-facing change in the software to merit all the hardware changes.
Add to this the advent of computer gaming consoles like Playstation, XBox, Wii. When I bought my first computer I spend $3,000 to buy it and another $1,500 in the first 12 months for hardware upgrades in order for me to play the latest computer games. Contrast this with current computer use. Games are on the gamestation and my computers are reaching 5+ years of age and still more than sufficient in terms of performance, drive space (easy to add more) and stability/security. There just isn't a need to get a new computer.
The even more interesting change is that in the past five years I have spent more money on game stations then computers and in the next five years will continue this trend, augemented by new TV, DVD, DVR...
Computers are still essential. But the consumer spending isn't in that direction any more. There will be few consumers without a computer entirely, but they are more inclined to upgrade their phone then their computer.
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Re:Yeah, well (Score:5, Funny)
Also, letting children near a computer is mind-bogglingly dangerous. My nephews would be the best QA engineers in the world if only they didn't answer, "I didn't do anything!" any time you asked them how they broke the computer.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"They" don't want to; "they" are home users.
None of those could exist without the PC.
Prior to the PC, a lot of that stuff was done on UNIX workstations. And after the PC stops being the darling of home users, it will be done on UNIX workstations again.
The fact that home computers and professional workstations are the same right now is a temporary state of affairs.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
None of those could exist without the PC.
I think the days of home PCs are numbered. Considering that cell phones and PDAs are now more powerful than "supercomputers" from 30 years ago, I see a dedicated box called a "PC" will dissolve, and instead the functionality will evolved into other devices.
I have a powerful computer at my house that I rent from my cable TV company. It has something l
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Computers aren't so complicated to use that you needed to grow up with one in order to be able to use it.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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PC/Vista sales are fine, Japan is problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the US PC industry has been kicking as with respect to wall street expectations.
Microsoft beat expectations, including very good Vista sales, and broke through a five year ceiling of $30 and climbed to $37 last week after announcing earnings.
For the last three years HP has had a steady climb from $20 to $50. Analysts love their PC business.
For the last year and a half Intel has climbed from $17 to $27 as the Core architecture plugged the hole created by the Pentium 4 and that had let AMD gain market share. Analysts are in love with Intel again.
Dell is crawling out of a hole it fell into last years, analysts are starting to show interest in them again.
The problem is the Japanese economy. Last week they announced that unemployment had gotten worse. Sales are nearly flat year over year, industrial output down, exports to the US are down, exports to China are slowing, etc. Toyota stock has been going downhill all year, $138 to #113.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To be preemptive. (Score:3, Insightful)
A. Yes there are things that PC can do that Devices cannot do as well. But a lot of people are willing to take that tradeoff for mobility
B. No the PC will be a Dying market but will take a Long time before it dies. Look at the Mainframe market it is a dying market but it never completely dies.
Change is scary but it will happen the trick is try to keep your sills diverse enough to account for this.
Re:To be preemptive. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You need to lay off the mainframe comparisons (Score:4, Insightful)
However the other thing is, as far as I can tell, the mainframe market is as good as it ever was. Mainframe sales never died, or even waned, there just never have been that many of them. There still are people who buy mainframes, just not a whole lot. It wasn't that the PC supplanted the mainframe, more that it augmented it. We have probably 20,000-30,000 PCs where I work but we still have 2 mainframes and are likely to buy a third.
So if you wanted to claim that the PC situation will be the same as the mainframe situation, it would be more accurate to say that PCs are going to continue to do just fine, they are just going to be far eclipsed by personal devices like cell phones.
Also, the article, as they often do, seems to have a body that is different form the headline. The headline would imply that people are ditching their PCs, just using other devices. The body, however, reveals they are just not upgrading them as fast. Ahh, well that's a little different, now isn't it? PC use isn't declining just because sales decline, that just means people aren't buying them as often. This is not highly surprising since, all else aside, you don't need a new PC as bad as you used to.
I remember when PCs were just universally slow. Just doing normal things they took an amount of time that wasn't acceptable to people. Apps took 30 seconds or more to load, and don't get me started on how long you could have to wait on a print job. As such you always felt like you needed an upgrade. When something faster came out, you wanted it. After all, your current experience sucked, you wanted to make it better. Well that's not the case any more. Even on older hardware, things happen in a reasonable amount of time. It's not as fast as newer hardware, but we are talking the difference between a 1 and 5 second load time and such. There just isn't the feeling that you really need more power all the time.
That's well and good, and that combined with market saturation (everyone who wishes to have a PC already having one) will lead to slower sales. However it doesn't mean it'll lead to any less usage.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of the current desire to stay in touch electronically was born with the PC, instant messaging and so on, but it has evolved. Who cares if a phone can do less, so long as the core functionality you need is there?
B. No the PC will be a Dying market but will take a Long time before it dies. Look at the Mainframe market it is a dying market but it never completely dies.
T
Diminishing sales equals diminishing use? (Score:5, Insightful)
The advances of the last few years have gotten to the point where many people are satisfied and don't need to buy a new one. The only excpetion to this is the Gamer market, and I can see why gadget-crazy Japan might prefer Sony PS3 and Wii's to pc gaming.
I wonder if the people looking purely at sales are making a pretty basic error here, though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Warcraft
Consoles
End of the GHZ wars and software to utilize the speed
Microsoft's Vista only DX10
World of warcraft has done something that no game in history has ever done. It's made it quite ok to run on antiquated hardware. I'm not saying that the latest expansion runs fantastically on a 1.8GHz proc, but but is quite playable with a reasonable video card. Blizzard is a significant thorn in the side of hardware manufacturers, how dare they not double the specs every
fast enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Sales (Score:3, Funny)
From my experience for example, Sony has made products which have more style over practical usage. I'm not going to pay $2000 for a styled pc which you can't use and breaks a month out of warranty.
morphing, changing, not dying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:morphing, changing, not dying (Score:5, Insightful)
You make an excellent point, it just wasn't the one you intended.
Parent
Saturated market. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the point of a new computer when the existing one do the tasks you need.
*yawn* (Score:4, Insightful)
Do realize, though... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Since my PC died the other week (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, I'm typing this comment with it.
It works well, especially since the wiiware USB keyboard code upgrade, but for some reason, I can't reply to my gmail messages or view videos made with a more recent version of flash... hopefully these issues will be resolved soon with an update.
For the rest of my online needs, I use the workplace computer.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have found that the workplace computer is excellent for reading Slashdot...
report from the field (Score:5, Interesting)
In the big electronics stores, like K's or Yamada Denki, PCs aren't the big draws - it's other stuff, including TVs.
Out of my middle school students, many of them don't use PCs on a regular basis and many of the high school students I know don't either (though I am in basically the Arkansas of Japan, but even when I lived in Osaka, I felt like this was true). Those that do don't have their own, they use their parent's. Most of what we do on a PC, including casual games, e-mail, and web surfing (and increasingly other things - my cell phone has a decent 2MB camera [a friend of mine has the summer's top of the line au phone with a 5MB], an MP3 player with iTunes like software ([au's lismo service]), Japanese/English dictionary, and simple Japanese OCR).
It's part of the reason why the web channel on the web was a big deal. For Americans, it just meant we might not have had to get out of bed to check Gmail, but for a lot of Japanese is was an important vector onto the Internet.
That said, when I went to college in Japan a lot of my friends ending up buying laptops or using them extensively in the school's various computer labs. And at work now, everyone can use a PC and desktop publishing / graphics (granted, I work at a town cultural hall, so they might come to the job with some of those skills already). One of my coworkers is even a Mac guy and another, the main graphics guy is thinking about upgrading from his Toshiba to a MacBook. Stuff like Macs and the iPod are going more ground here.
And the internet culture here is still pretty big - most people my age know about 2chan, even if they don't post and the big drama from two years ago was Densha Otoko, based on a supposedly true story about a nerdy anime fan who met a beautiful girl, began dating her, and asked for help on 2chan. You can still get 2chan's mascot, noma neko dolls around as well. Mixi (an invite only Japanese facebook site) and other internet groups are still pretty big here, so it's not like the things computers represent are going away, but rather PCs like devices, like phones and game consoles, are taking their place.
Market Saturation (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, smartphones ARE PCs. (Score:5, Insightful)
My smartphone has MS Office compatible word processor, spreadsheet, and database. It sends email and browses the web. It takes photos and manages my budget. It has an always-on map (Google Maps) that I can use to get my position and/or directions anywhere.
It IS a personal computer.
PCs aren't dying, they're getting integrated more closely into our lives.
Average people don't need PCs (Score:4, Insightful)
People need something to do personal finances, write up school homework, manage their photos and music and to send emails and surf the web.
Average people need a nice powerful PDA in a sub-notebook form factor that can hook up to a large screen and they need a PDA/Phone that fits in their pocket that can sync up with their full size PDA.
AVerage people don't care about writing their own software or customizing their experience (beyond wallpaper and ringtones)....
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a quite good talk [ted.com] that summarizes this in another context. It is worth watching in my opinion. The relevant gist of it is that we shouldn't cater for the average or "the biggest group" because the average is usually, only a relative majority of the market.
What we should be doing is to look for clusters of users, not just the bi
Japan is different (Score:4, Insightful)
Hidden Computers... (Score:5, Interesting)
He asserted that computers were going the same way -- you might end up with dozens of powerful computers in your house, but you wouldn't call them that. You'd call them a "newspad" or a "TV" or a "reader" or whatever. They'd be invisible, with specialized interfaces for whatever task was at hand.
So far, his prediction appears to be on track.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder what things we take for granted now will be next to impossible in the future. All kinds of hardware mods, obviously. Changing OS, probably. Maybe even typing on a keyboard, who needs that w
The only difference... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think a lot of functionality will eventually end up in smaller devices, but there will always be a number of apps that still need a pc-like device. Like browsing the web, managing music, videos and photo's, typing a document and making a presentation.
Separate devices for each and every app are a waste of money and space.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Technology plateau (Score:3, Interesting)
The PC industry plateaued in the 1970s (miniframes and hobby computers), 1980s (death of 8-bit computers), 1990s (death of 8088 based PCs and 68000 series Macs), and we'll soon happen again, likely marked as the end of the Intel age. This is normal as technology doesn't develop in nice, easy to manage chunks. Moore's law just says that transistors will double every 18 months, not that everyone will have a use for all of them.
The growth in the market these days seems to be in microcontrollers, using designs that are becoming just as powerful as a PC without the OS tax. It is interesting to note that the trend is following the same software curve as before: authoring in assembler, migrating to simple microcode languages, stripped down OS (tiny Linux), custom OS (like Windows mobile smartphones and OS X on the iPhone). I wonder if the people writing the OS for these devices will realize that at one time Windows and DOS would fit on a few floppies.
The Dominance it HAD??? (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, I've lived here in Japan off and on since 1998, and I've got a problem with this article.
The PC has never been big here. I teach university, and, seriously, I have kids who have never used a computer. Never. Not at home; not at school. I have to teach them how to open and close windows. How to click. How to type in Japanese (for whatever bizarre reason, no one uses the Japanese kana keyboard--they type in Roman characters and the computer changes them to kana, so they usually have to type 2 characters to get one).
When I first came in 1998 as a university student, the other foreign exchange students and I were mortified when we asked the university where we could connect to the internet so we could email our families to tell them we'd arrived, only to be told "Internet? We don't have that." A university with something like 15,000 students. With no internet.
"What," we asked, "you mean, not in the foreign exchange building? That's fine, we can go over to the library..."
"No, sorry. Not there either."
"Well, what about the professors? They have it don't they?"
"Some do, yes. But please don't bother them."
Finally, enough of us whined enough that they wired up two ancient Macs in the commons area. The students self-organized a waiting list to use them. They were horribly slow. The entire campus shared a single ISDN line. I gave up and just started dialing into the modem pool at my US university to quickly upload/download mail via the line-in on a pay phone.
What was the killer app that made the PC a must-have for most of the developed world? Internet, right? Well, most people in Japan had the internet on their cellphones (keitais) long before they had it at home. As a result, if you ask someone to mail you, the first thing they're going to do is tap out a message on their keitai.
But there's more to it. Of course email was the killer app for the internet in the rest of the world, but another was online shopping (in the case of the US, anyway). This has not taken off in Japan so much either. Why? Well, and this is just my new pet theory, a few days old, there is a cultural difference at play.
In the US, many of us are descendants of homesteaders and other people living in the middle of nowhere. You went to town once a month, if you had one. JC Penney, Sears, etc. were all originally what kind of company? Mail-order. You ordered your stuff via post, and then they arrived on the train. Next time you were in town, you picked it up. We have a strong mail-order cultural meme. Not so in Japan, which has basically always been urban, because most of Japan is uninhabitable (like 45-degree angles--beautiful mountains, but not so good for living on). Everyone lived and lives in the little strips of flattish land between the oceans and the mountains. So there is a strong culture of going to the shops (run by people you know) to get stuff. People--older people, especially--are very uncomfortable with ordering things they haven't seen.
Playing into the above problem is another: no customer rights. Return policies are usually not clearly stated. If you want to return something, you need to beg and convince a manager you deserve it. Worse still, the credit card is not the great deal it is in the rest of the world. In Western countries, you put purchases on a credit line with a credit card. Here, you have to pay it off at a rate you specify when you make the purchase. You don't know what bill any purchase is going to show up on, and the bill is direct-debit. Furthermore, the banks offer none of the protections we take for granted. If your card gets stolen or a database hacked, guess who pays? You. You're totally responsible for everything that happens with that card, even if it has nothing to do with you. So people don't really like using them. Personally, I try to use my US card as much as possible, because of the protections it affords.
Also, space constraints. The only thing that
Utter Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cookin up a mug of (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:cookin up a mug of (Score:5, Informative)
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