3 ms·

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore Is this because nobody is using PCs anymore or because consumer grade PCs currently have an expected life of 5+

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore Is this because nobody is using PCs anymore or because consumer grade PCs currently have an expected life of 5+ years?

dspillett 13y ago
To a large extent, yes. A decade ago you needed to significant upgrade every couple of years to stay current but now a machine can stay useful for the basics and beyond[1] for considerably longer. There is also competition from the consoles, cheap media players and portable devices: instead of upgrading their PCs many home users buy those devices instead and leave the old PC for when they need to crank open a MS Office document. And having not spent money on new hardware, they resent paying for an upgrade to Windows (which traditionally the cost of was hidden in amongst the cost of that new PC). [1] even games if you don't mind not playing the latest graphics fests, especially with the growing indy circuit[2] and the growth of mobile devices[3]. [2] which is supporting older hardware better than the big players [3] because once you are optimised to the point where the game works on cheap tablets, that old PC will probably play a port of it quite well too
josteink 13y ago
Sales have been plummeting across the PC business for a couple of years now, and Windows has reached a point of "good enough" leaving people little incentive to upgrade outside of HW replacement cycles. And to paint a even bleaker picture you still have 30%+ of the worldwide Windows user-base still running XP, i.e. while PC-users on the Windows platform, they haven't actually paid for a OS license in over a decade. The business of selling a licensed OS either shrink-wrapped or to OEMs is seemingly much less profitable than it used to be, and clearly not an area where future growth can be expected. You can't blame Microsoft for trying to find something else to base future growth on.

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore Is this because nobody is using PCs anymore or because consumer grade PCs currently have an expected life of 5+ years?

dspillett 13y ago

To a large extent, yes. A decade ago you needed to significant upgrade every couple of years to stay current but now a machine can stay useful for the basics and beyond[1] for considerably longer. There is also competition from the consoles, cheap media players and portable devices: instead of upgrading their PCs many home users buy those devices instead and leave the old PC for when they need to crank open a MS Office document. And having not spent money on new hardware, they resent paying for an upgrade to Windows (which traditionally the cost of was hidden in amongst the cost of that new PC). [1] even games if you don't mind not playing the latest graphics fests, especially with the growing indy circuit[2] and the growth of mobile devices[3]. [2] which is supporting older hardware better than the big players [3] because once you are optimised to the point where the game works on cheap tablets, that old PC will probably play a port of it quite well too

josteink 13y ago

Sales have been plummeting across the PC business for a couple of years now, and Windows has reached a point of "good enough" leaving people little incentive to upgrade outside of HW replacement cycles. And to paint a even bleaker picture you still have 30%+ of the worldwide Windows user-base still running XP, i.e. while PC-users on the Windows platform, they haven't actually paid for a OS license in over a decade. The business of selling a licensed OS either shrink-wrapped or to OEMs is seemingly much less profitable than it used to be, and clearly not an area where future growth can be expected. You can't blame Microsoft for trying to find something else to base future growth on.