The Dying PC Market 307
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.""
Yeah, well (Score:5, Insightful)
None of those could exist without the PC.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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:Yeah, well (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..
morphing, changing, not dying (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Market Saturation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:To be preemptive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, well (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.
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)....
Japan is different (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:morphing, changing, not dying (Score:5, Insightful)
You make an excellent point, it just wasn't the one you intended.
Re:Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:To be preemptive. (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.
The PC is, I think, dying as an entertainment medium. No problem there, after all that wasn't why the PC came into existence, and there are other devices that are better at the most popular game types. OK the RTS is predominantly a PC thing, but that's just because the PC has better control mechanisms at present, the mouse and such. Those weren't invented for gaming though, who's to say there won't be better control systems evolving for consoles? I certainly hope so.
Personally I'd be happy to see the PC shrink in importance in the entertainment market. For one thing they'd start to get cheaper most like, and I for one need as many as I can get in order to run the experiments that make up my hobbies. (as an aside, it's a bizarre turnabout that I am seriously pondering clustered PS3s as an alternative, but I digress).
Besides, I am sick, really sick, of always having to upgrade some component or other to play the latest game. My main home pc has a seriously fast chip, but an old graphics card (old now that is, I didn't buy it that long ago, and it wasn't cheap), so I can't play some new games without spending the equivalent of the cost of a console. I don't want to replace the processor I have either, its perfect for my non gaming needs.
Re:Do realize, though... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Average people don't need PCs (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 biggest cluster you can generally find, and say: "Hey! If we try to follow the mythical average, a lot of people won't like it! They'll be left unhappy and their needs aren't catered to, even though they are not small groups. Let's find out what our users really want, take the top 4-5 clusters and market to those groups independently. This will cover 90-95% of the people on the market instead of 45-65%!".
PCs like automobiles are now a mature market? (Score:1, Insightful)
I think pcs are like that now. The major growth period for hardware is over. Only when technology makes your current machine too old to run current programs do you need another.
Re:Yeah, well (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.
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.
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.
Re:Diminishing sales equals diminishing use? (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 year?
Consoles are making serious impovements these days. When the XBOX hit the market, it was little more than a middle upper end PC. The PS3 is an insane multi-processing platform. The WII has raised the bar on control and has a massive following.
The more cores war has failed to capture the publics eye. Would you like your new honda with 1,2 or 4 engines.... They're just lost. And really, who needs that power right now? So you can John some hashes faster, that doesn't help your grandmother do her taxes. The lions share of app developers aren't writing for more cores. Software is stagnating, pc sales will as well. Throw vista on a desktop with all the horsepower you want and you still have a sluggish buggy, driver alienated OS, MS threw DX10 on that and people aren't writing for it. If DX10 were on XP, there would be a host of new games sitting out there waiting for you to throttle up.
Things will kick back off again, it'll just take time.
Utter Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)