Microsoft predicts another cruel quarter for PCs

sygnus21 said:

That said, for clarity… market saturation is when the market is flooded with a particular item, good or device.

A very specific item, not a broad category of products.
PCs aren't all the same product nor all have the same userbase. Unless you want to claim that a rig with a socket 775 Pentium D from 2006 and whatever high end card of 2006 is somehow equivalent to a I7 3770k and a GTX 680 from yesteryear.

My comment about volatility of market saturation is because of product obsolescence.
Fast performance growth means fast product obsolescence.
Slow performance growth means slow product obsolescence and will eventually lead to market saturation as people with increasingly old stuff don't buy a new product as the old one is still good enough for their needs.

When the PC made next year is 60% to 100% more powerful than the one sold now, in a couple years the one I bought now is obsolete, and unless I want to keep using a legacy system none will support anymore, I will have to buy a new PC.

Up to 2005-ish the processing power increase was like that, then it started to transition to the pathetic 25% increases we see today. This is also one of the main reasons XP remained so wildly popular. A lot of the PCs used to run it never became obsolete (the second reason was that Vista sucked, but we all know that).

In the case of desktops, the market was pretty much flooded by 2005.

If by "desktops" you mean the whole broad category, it was flooded in 2000 or even before.
What saved them was the fast turnover.

What will keep them going for a while is their portability, and the fact that they’re getting more powerful, faster, and even more versatile with the emergence of better operating systems which allows them to interface with a host of peripherals, and even other operating systems – Android/Windows, Windows/Macs.

That's peanuts. Tablets and most ultra-mobile devices are cleverly built. On average they won't last more than 2 years, as their batteries will degrade and die by that point with normal use. Can you change them? No. These devices are not designed to be serviced, not even in the painful way laptops are.
That's lithium batteries. I wonder why none thinks of using LiFePO4 battery technology...

See? Forced product obsolescence. They won't have the issues PCs had. Besides, planned product obsolescence is the norm on any consumer device anyway. Stuff is no more made to last. Stuff is made to fail after a certain amount of time to force you to buy a new one.
They learned from their mistakes.

At any rate I think we both agree that the desktop PC is falling wayside to the tablet…

Only for home use, mainly as "dumb" terminals to stream entertainment stuff and browse the net.
I don't see tablets in the future of businness and real-work part of computing.

Businesses and schools will always need desktops and will never change to anything like Windows 8. You will always have a huge percentage of the market that lags behind the cutting edge for stability and the inability to upgrade hundreds of computers every year or so....and companies like Microsoft HAVE to meet their needs in the end.

SuperTweaker said:

Errr XP will have had a life span of 14 years. There is no planned obsolence in the computer world, just newer technologies.

Plus, some of those later XP machines (SP1, SP2 and SP3) will be upgraded to Windows 7 or Windows 8, that will give some users 20 years with the same machine. DDR2 Memory will be around for another 20 years even though DDR3 is the current version. USB 2.0 will be around another 20 years too. Without a doubt, 32 bit will be around another 20 years as well.

If any of us live that long it will be interesting to come back to this post and see how accurate I am, was.

Yup. And this is what caused the market saturation when technology advancement slowed (as it was the main reason to buy a new PC).
Old PCs still work fine after friggin decades. Unless the newer ones aren't significantly better why change them?

Tablets and mobile devices on the other hand...

Btw, XP's "life span" will likely be longer than 14 years as there are a lot of workstations that only talk to a local server and run a handfew of work-specific programs so who cares if it's technically "unsafe" to go on the net and download/install stuff as will happen when support ends. And of course a lot of still perfectly capable hardware to run it on. If case needs it, it can be run in a VM with a hypervisor so that there is no more need for drivers (as the one actually interfacing with hardware is the hypervisor). Cisco offers a free hypervisor that can do it, and a lot of other linux-based (free) hypervisors can do the same.

So why waste money in new hardware and ridiculously expensive licenses (both OS and work-specific programs) plus wasted time, IT techs pulling their hairs to configure new stuff that refuses to work for arcane reasons, and re-training costs to teach each and every dumb employee how to operate the new workstation? I mean jumping from XP to 8 is going to lockdown a company for months just because users can't operate the workstation anymore.

Let's not forget that XP still has 35-40% of usage share (around half a billion of PCs running XP) and there is no sign of major decreases. They aint' dropping XP and install 7 or 8 overnight when support ends. They are already committed.
Converting them all before support ends is not even possible on a realistic timescale and MS knows it.

Businesses WON'T be making the move to Win 8. They will upgrade to 7 from XP, or stay with 7 if that is what they are running, until Microsoft comes out with a real OS again. Could you imagine having to be the one explain Win 8 to an average employee??

kbrady1979 said:

Businesses WON'T be making the move to Win 8. They will upgrade to 7 from XP, or stay with 7 if that is what they are running, until Microsoft comes out with a real OS again. Could you imagine having to be the one explain Win 8 to an average employee??

+1 to that.

sygnus21 said:

Next up, the home environment, where technologies will converge to integrate into a single hand-held PC to control the home. What will that OS be like?

My two cents.

You could make a case that we already have that.



Check out this awesome Tasker/AutoVoice home automation setup

I been noticing lately that most business,work places or education places around my town have been recently upgrading to windows 7. I never see windows 8 machines in public places unless it's a display at say walrmat or bestbuy. My fathers workplace recently upgraded to windows 7 from xp this year so microsoft isn't really making a impact with windows 8 in the workplace atm. I noticed the banks computers run windows 7 as well and so do all the high schools, not sure about the elementary schools but i'm sure they are going the same direction since they are from the same district. Can't blame them, windows 7 is just much easier to adpat to then windows 8 which has a slight learning curb to it since it's something way different with a few things let the same.