A persistent theme in my news feed is the decline of the PC industry. Some manufacturers blame Microsoft and especially Windows 8, others have blamed the netbooks for pushing prices so low that the industry is not sustainable. Some note that tablet sales went up, when PC sales went down, and remember that the households’ IT budget didn’t double when the iPad was launched.
What I haven’t seen mentioned by the industry or the commentators is what the consumers need and want. There is an underlying assumption that people must want to buy a new PCs every Nth year. But why should they?
A person who primarily needs the computer to browse the Internet, read news, access email, do netbanking, play a casual game and socialize via Facebook will be served well with an older PCs. If the only other things wished for is a simpler, wireless experience that can be enjoyed everywhere, a tablet fits the bill.
A modern PC can do amazing things, but why would the person sketched out above need one?
(writing some ideas sounds like my next post : )
A side note : If Windows 8 could be blamed for declining PC sales out would be because it is more resource efficient than previous versions of Windows, making upgrade to Windows 8 on an old PC an alternative to bring all new hardware.
Another side note: History seems to have proven Marc Andreesen right and more, when he said that “[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers”: the user above can do all that is to be done within a browser, making the OS and the hardware irrelevant (ref Wikiquote)