Will XP drive a boom in PC sales?
Saturn V wrote:
<<Windows XP is the last great hope for a quick rebound in demand. I am sure that there are lots of people like you, who have held off a computer purchase awaiting the release of Windows XP.
...
Personally I think that Windows XP is as much of an improvement over Windows 98, as Windows 95 was over Windows 3.1. Windows 98 was merely a minor revision to Windows 95.
Windows XP should have the stability of Windows 2000(NT), much greater ease of usage, and a large amount of features which will appeal to the mass market. So I think that the Microsoft/Intel media blitz stands a good chance of repeating the success of the Windows 95 launch. >>
I hope so, as an Intel shareholder.
But I am not holding my breath. While some folks (here, elsewhere) are probably holding off on buying new machines until XP is pre-installed, I don't see a huge number of these people. If they need new PCs, they've probably been buying them all summer long. Sales haven't dried-up completely, so clearly a lot of people buy what they need when they need it.
(Except for saving maybe a hundred bucks or so by waiting for the pre-installed version, what's the attraction of having it pre-loaded? Just about everyone I know with either PCs or Macs or Linux has had to, or wanted to, re-install the OS from CD-ROMs anyway. This is probably why Dell's "pre-installed Linux" product wasn't an attractive niche product: anyone interested in using Linux probably was a) competent to install Linux, and b) wanted the flexibility of choosing Debian over Red Hat, Mandrake over SUSE, etc.)
For most people, I certainly agree with you that XP will be a win over earlier consumer- and small business-type systems. (NT presumably already being used by a lot of other users, including many here on SI.)
I use OS X on my Macs, and I love it to pieces! Stable, robust, a modern OS core (BSD Unix, Mach kernel) and OpenStep tools, OpenGL graphics, beautiful graphics, etc.
I assume from what I have read that XP will be a similar experience for many folks.
But will people buy new machines just to get XP? (Or OS X in the Mac universe?) I don't see why they would. If their existing machines are mostly doing what they need them to do, why upgrade?
This is especially so for businesses. They may not even buy the XP licenses for a while, based on some news articles I've seen (the gist being: "It will cost me $$$ to upgrade 400 machines to XP. Why should I?")
It's looking like the back-to-school boom has not materialized this year. (We should hear from Intel some comments about this on Thursday...)
Will there be a Christmas boom as a result of XP? Well, consider that we'll be seeing the X-Box and Nintendo Cube both rolled out in November...that may suck a lot of air out of the market for new Christmas PCs for Junior. (Pace our recent discussions of computer gaming on PCs vs. dedicated machines, on whether 2 GHz processors are really the best way to play games (for the dollar), and about the lack of compelling Napster-like driving forces for college kids to buy new machines.)
I hope PC sales boom in Q4. But I'm not holding my breath.
--Tim May |
