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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Swiss who wrote (84040)	12/7/1998 8:41:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Goldberg on Home PC-Trends and inference. Drew: Some interesting observation by Goldberg. ================================================================== Home PC Penetration is Up - But Multi-PC Households are Not OK, so we all know that home PC penetration is going up, and Bill Gate's prediction of 60% penetration is likely to become a reality. One of the key questions that follows this finding is, how many households will have more than one PC? After all, it should be like the telephone, right? You couldn't have a house with one phone, so why not have a house with more than one PC? Well, it looks like the consumers just aren't buying that. In the last 18 months, a boom period for home PC sales, the number of homes with more than one PC has risen only slightly, and on a percentage basis, the movement is almost non-existent. This is also surprising if you look at the fact that the majority of PC-owning households have children. One might think that the old PC would be good enough for them, or that they'd hijack the new PC and force Mom or Dad to live with the old one. Either way, the lack of growth in multi-PC households is a bit unexpected. Source: Technology User Profile This is kind of good news/bad news data. The good news is that, in the long run, consumers really are not continuing to use their older PCs. Even though more than 60% of the consumer PC market is made up of repeat purchasers, the fact is that they are not really turning into multiple PC-using households. Those old machines are disposed of or stuck away in attics (how many children in the year 2049 will find old Windows PCs in their grandparents attic and start asking about the old days when PCs had keyboards and not everyone was on the internet!, and that means more business for new PCs ), not used. This is good news in that the installed base is not clogged up with a bunch of older machines that are taking up spots where new PCs could be sold. On the bad news front, it appears that if we are to really see any significant home networking action, the networks will have to focus on the integration of non-PC devices as much, or more than, PC devices. And that creates a problem. Unlike PCs, most consumer electronic devices such as camcorders, VCRs, TVs, audio systems, and the rest are not upgraded every four years. Heck, how many of you have a TV more than 10 years old being used in your house somewhere? And last time I checked, most 10 year old TVs don't have any kind of network connection. The result of this is that "infrastructure" companies like cable suppliers and phone companies will have to come to the fore front in helping integrate the non-PC products with a PC. It is well within the realm of possibility that a cable company could bring the signal into the PC, which would distribute it throughout the house to the old TV products, and new services could be run through a PC interface. Still, the idea of a PC or PC-like device in many rooms doesn't seem far-fetched to me. We'll see in the future if the rest of the consumers start to agree with me, or continue to have just one PC in use at a time. Source: Infobeads- by Aaron Goldberg