PC market sinking even faster than first thought, thanks to Windows 10

The Register ^ | 10 Jun 2016 | Simon Sharwood

[george76]

The abacus-shufflers of analyst firm IDC have revised their 2016 PC sales forecasts downwards.

The firm now says PC shipments “... are forecast to decline by 7.3% year over year”. That's “roughly two per cent below earlier projections as conditions have been weaker than expected.” The firm names “weak currencies, depressed commodity prices, political uncertainty, and delayed projects” as the weaker conditions impacting sales.

Windows 10 isn't helping matters either, because lots of people are availing themselves of free Windows 10 upgrades rather than buying a new PC. The firm also says that “while a large share of enterprises are evaluating Windows 10, the pace of new PC purchases has not yet stabilized commercial PC shipments.” Which sounds like plenty of organisations just aren't pulling the upgrade trigger fast enough to give the PC market a kick.

IDC also blames Windows 10 for slowing workstation sales. Earlier this week the firm reported EMEA workstation shipment numbers, reporting sales of 1,170,000 in the region during 2015, down from 2014's 1,194,000 shipments. "It looks like Windows 10 migration has been the priority in enterprise infrastructure budgets this year," said Mohamed Hefny, program manager in the Virtualization, Systems, and Infrastructure Solutions department of IDC CEMA.

[DaxtonBrown]

The only thing I can’t completely shake is Word (for publishing books, it is still more accurate). Otherwise I am full to the hilt with Fedora, Apache, MariaDB, Gimp, Blender, FreeCad and LibreCad, LibreCalc, my own Java software on NetBeans, Audacity, Hydrogen and other music programs.

Couple more years and completely done with Microsof. Think of the $$$ saved for the packages I use. Big $$$

[DaxtonBrown]

[“Fedora Linux as my main system.Not perfect”

What are the drawbacks?]

See the post above. I still need Word when I publish books. Also some of the audio codecs are hard to get, though that might be because I’m running bleeding edge Fedora 24 and they haven’t caught up.

Oh, and don’t run an Nvidia card, lack of drivers.

All in all though, pretty damn close and improving all the time. I’m running KDE desktop rather than Gnome, it is closer to the old windows look and feel. All business, I have to do work on my machines not fart around.

[dsc]

Thanks.