Microsoft’s Hardware Push And The Falling PC Market

Comment

Image Credits:

The PC industry had a big week. Microsoft debuted several news devices built to run its new Windows 10 operating system, garnering a more-positive press cycle than I anticipated. The software giant also announced that 110 million devices now ran the new operating system, a number that it seems proud of.

The glow stemming from all of that was tempered a few days later by the release of new PC sales data from both Gartner and IDC.

Two quotes:

Gartner: “Worldwide PC shipments totaled 73.7 million units in the third quarter of 2015, a 7.7 percent decline from the third quarter of 2014[.]”

IDC: “Worldwide PC shipments totaled nearly 71.0 million units in the third quarter of 2015 (3Q15), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. This volume represented a year-on-year decline of -10.8% – slightly worse than projections for a decline of -9.2%.”

So some good, and some bad.

A few questions: Will Windows 10’s release lead to lift in PC sales, even if temporary? If that is the case, did the release of Windows 10 come too late in the quarter to make much of an impact? If that is not the case, then it seems that Windows 10 will not drive an increase in PC sales.

The very first blog post I wrote for The Next Web — where I worked before coming to TechCrunch — had the following headline: “No Windows 7 PC Sales Bump Coming.” And that was Windows 7, mind, one of most popular versions of Windows ever.

I don’t recall Windows 8 doing the PC market many favors, either, at its debut. So we have at least some historical precedent that new builds of Windows are not key drivers of new unit volume.

Gartner and IDC, for whatever it is worth, appear to be modestly optimistic about the holiday quarter, a key sales period for PCs. Perhaps strong Windows 10 marketing can aid the pace of shipments.

But for now, despite a very interesting new operating system, the PC market remains mostly in line with expectations. Expectations that point down. 71 or 73 million PCs in three months is still a lot of hardware, revenue, and the like. But it’s a smaller number than it once was.

A final note, as we will not have this set of data again for another quarter: The global economy isn’t its most healthy at the moment, especially due to uncertainty in the Chinese economy. We’re discussing the global market, which leaves us forced to consider broader global trends. If China continues to deteriorate, it could impact PC purchases as companies rein in spend.

I suppose all we can say for now is that the PC market remains weak, but that it’s likely a bit too soon to tell what impact Windows 10 and its constituent new hardware may have heading into the last quarter of 2015.

Place your bets in the comments.

More TechCrunch

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch the AI reveals live

Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business