What about the poor old desktop?
The other way to make more money out of notebooks, of course, is to charge more for them. So what’s the non-£300 notebook market looking like?
“Consumer demand is going through a degree of sophistication and people are using notebooks for specific purposes,” says Morvay. “Therefore choice, usage and market segmentation are all important factors in selling more expensive notebooks. Also, we shouldn’t be selling PCs on the basis that they’re just good enough.”
I imagine that an intelligent professional woman like Morvay would be just the sort of customer retailers should be looking to up-sell to, so I ask what kind of computer she has. “I’ve got a pink Sony notebook,” she confesses.
There was I thinking the spray-it-pink-and-women-will-buy-it assumption was an oafish, anachronistic cliché. Far from it; apparently Dell did a survey before launching its Inspiron range in lots of colours and, globally, pink was consistently among the most popular.
Lastly, what about the poor old desktop? Surely it can’t be totally written off. Again this depends on segment, with the consumer market seeing a 20 percent year-on-year drop off, SMB’s more or less stable and the corporate world managing a volume increase of 16 percent. “Corporate desktop is an almost 100 percent renewal market,” explains Morvay.
“The last round of renewals was in 2004 so, assuming a roughly four year cycle, we should see a lot of renewals this year.” In other words, if you’re in desktops, enjoy this year because it may get rather lean for the following three.
2008 also looks set to be the year of sub-notebook devices like the Asus EeePC, which took the market by storm late last year by being even cheaper than everything else, and UMPCs, MIDs, etc. However, they do seem to create some problems for analysts.
“Q4 shipments of the EeePC weren’t counted because the specs were so low that they barely function as a full PC,” says Morvay. “However, we haven’t created a separate category for them and they will probably be counted from Q1 ’08 onwards.”
We decided that this topic is a whole separate interview in itself and one that might be best done on camera. So if you would like to see the very telegenic Eszter Morvay (pictured here in her previous HEXUS.tv interview) being interviewed by…me, with the help of HEXUS.tv, then watch this space.
