Vista’s release not having major impact on PC sales
By Ruben Francia
Despite Bill Gates disclosure last week at WinHEC that Microsoft has sold 40 million copies of Vista since the operating system hit the market, high-tech market research firm, In-Stat, says the demand for new PCs has not been impacted significantly by Vista’s delay and subsequent release.
“With the recent release of Vista, a short-term rise in PC demand is anticipated,” says Ian Lao, In-Stat analyst. “System sales that had been muted waiting for systems pre-loaded with Vista rather than XP are expected to work through sales channels in the next two quarters. However, these sales represent an offset from last year rather than actual new demand creation.”
In other words, the long-term expectations have not changed in the wake of Vista’s launch. In-Stat predicts 300 million PCs to be sold in 2009, the same number it predicted when Windows XP was still the most recent OS.
In-Stat told TG Daily that while it does not question Microsoft’s sales figures, it does not believe in its assertions that Vista will cause any kind of “unexpected surge” in PC purchasing. It is also unclear how many of the 40 million copies were pre-installed on new computers and how many of the upper tier versions of the OS were sold.
Corporate buying cycles continue to be the dominant factor in enterprise demand for new PCs, but Vista’s release is having even less effect on corporate customers, noted In-Stat.
While the new OS might be a “nice new operating system with good features,” Lao said, overall it is not proving to be a “demand creator” for PC buyers.
In-Stat says the only real winner from the release of Vista is going to be memory manufacturers, which it says are likely to see around a 20% year-to-year revenue increase through the end of the decade.
Lao expects PCs shipping with a premium version of Vista to come with 1GB of RAM in the form of two 512MB sticks. On the other hand, users of those PCs shipped with 512MB are expected to be looking to upgrade/replace their memory.
The research, “Vista Update: Assessing Vista’s Impact on PC Demandâ€, covers the worldwide market for PCs. It includes revenue and unit sales forecasts for PCs and PC semiconductors through 2011, as well as PC quarterly sales forecasts through the end of 2007. It also includes analysis of the impact of Vista on secondary markets.
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