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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (57985)	6/15/1998 12:14:00 PM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

100 Million new PC's/Year, 1 Billion connected PC's Exciting numbers, but what do they mean? I don't think this means 100 million incremental PC's per year. Does anyone know what the net incremental number of PC's are per year. (New PC's less PC's taken out of service, scrapped, etc.). From the numbers I've seen, about half the homes in the US now have PC's, which equates to about 50 million households based on the last census. Some percentage of these have more than one PC. But I would guess there are less than 100 million home PC's in the US. (And I would also guess a large percentage of the non PC households planning to buy fall in the sub-0 category, based on economic profiles of that segment and the intended use for the PC). I've also seen numbers that there are now approximately 1 PC per desk worker in the US workforce. Again, this equates to something less than 100 Million PC's in the workplace. (From this I would also conclude that most new PC's sold into this segment are replacement units). So I estimate the US has approximately 200 million PC's in use, (about 0.6 PC's per man, woman and child). True, a large percentage of the population has a PC both at home and in the workplace, but I think this is largely accounted for in the numbers. These are just my guesses, of course, but they seem in the ballpark. I'd be happy to see official numbers if anyone has them. The 100 Million new PC's and 1 Billion connected PC's are W/W forecasts, of course. Currently the US represents over half the market. How many units forecast to be purchased are incremental and how many are replacements? How many new units are performance driven versus price driven? Is the US near saturation? If so, what will drive replacement units? Do we need that killer app everyone talks about? What is it? And if we are to have 1 Billion connected PC's, won't this require huge sales into the ROW? Sub-0's are the fastest growing segment. Is this phenomena spilling over into the workplace? Is hardware technology ahead of applications? Wish I knew the answers. :-)