Interesting; Actually, this is interesting timing because one of my E-mail newsletters actually links to a refutation to this particular note from a month or so ago.
As usual, Slashdot being Slashdot.
The linked article starts off pretty badly:
The ailing personal computer market is getting weaker
Where does it get this information? By what definition are they using the term "weaker"? Windows 8 sold more copies in it's first month than Windows 7 did in it's first three. I find it difficult to blame any PC market "ailing" on Either.
Trying to SELL a PC is probably getting harder. More and more people are realizing that they can build PCs, and more and more people are finding that
they don't need a new PC to begin with. PCs haven't advanced as quickly in the last few years. Anecdotally, my Q8200 based machine I built in 2008-2009 can still play most of the latest games quite well.
For the longest time, people were under the false assumption that computers simply "slowed down" over time. This is partly because reinstalling Windows and your applications is simply not something people could do easily; for most people, the computer was a magic box, and once it slowed down, they had to buy a new one. However, more recent Operating Systems have much friendlier and easier to use Setup Procedures, and Manufacturer Policies such as Recovery Partitions and Discs have helped as well, since they allow anybody to revert their machine to "new" state. This has started to dispel the PC Sales associate dreamworld where people thought that their right-click menu taking a long time meant they needed a new PC, turning a large portion of the PC userbase into a virtual smorgasbord of commissions.
The prevalence of PCs has caused something interesting- people have learned about them. Just as the Printing Press and the eventual availability of affordable books caused an increase in literacy, so too has the prevalence- and commodity- of PCs caused people to become far more literate in the past. People are far more versed in how to perform standard maintenance on their machines, and the end result is that they suit their purposes just fine.
Moving back to the article:
The latest evidence of the PC's infirmity emerged Wednesday with the release of two somber reports showing unprecedented declines in sales of desktop and laptop machines during the first three months of the year.
It then mentions how it seems that the latest release of Windows has done more harm than good since it was released last October, while ignoring the tenet that correlation is not causation. The fact of the matter is that There are many reasons fewer people bought PCs. Foremost among them are my aforementioned reasons regarding people becoming more computer literate and capable of maintaining their software environments, enough that they can do a cleanup, or a malware scan, or any number of other things to resolve issues they are having, rather than attribute the problem to the invisible ghost of "PC aging" that has for so long brought wealth to PC sales associates everywhere.
If a person is already happy with their current system, they aren't going to buy a new one. Windows 8 being pre-installed is likely not as much of an issue to the sales as people seem to infer, since Windows 8 Sales are actually quite healthy- and people are installing it onto PCs they already have, because, unlike many of the Operating System's previous incarnations, it doesn't actually require any additional horsepower.
