Ouch:
It’s not a good time to be a PC maker… especially if you cater to the corporate crowd. Both Gartner and IDC estimate that the computer market shrank between 5.2 to 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2015, in part because many companies stopped upgrading from Windows XP. Simply put, many of the businesses that wanted to modernize already have — they’re not propping up the market like they were for a good chunk of 2014. IDC goes so far as to claim that this was the lowest volume of PC shipments since the start of 2009, which is no mean feat given that the world was still reeling from an economic collapse at the time.
Still, there are a few silver linings on this dark cloud. Lenovo is still on the rise, and ASUS is enjoying a resurgence that’s helped in part by its larger Windows tablets (at least, according to Gartner). However, the situation is still gloomy for Acer, Dell and most other system builders.
Windows 10 is supposed to goose sales hurt by the clusterfudge that was Windows 8 — but that will probably be true only in the consumer space. If corporations are done, they’re done for a while.
A big part of the problem is, once you have a machine powerful enough for email, spreadsheets, and word processing, probably 90% of your corporate customers have all the power they’ll ever need. Editing 4K video requires massive horsepower, but that’s a rarified requirement — and a modern Intel Core i3 is “good enough” for more corporate needs.
And it will be for a very long time.
EXIT QUESTION: Where is the next great business app which will drive the next great business upgrade cycle? It’s been ages since there was anything truly new to do on a work PC.
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