It is no surprise that a billion personal computers have been shipped: what's surprising is that it has happened so soon. According to Gartner Dataquest, which tracks sales, it happened in April, though the announcement was only made last week. Now we are looking forward to the next billion, which Gartner thinks will be shipped by early 2008. The PC industry is supposedly dead on its feet, but Gartner expects shipments to grow from 125m last year to 226m in 2008.
Let's put that a little differently. Gartner expects PC sales to grow from last year's 342,455 per day to around 619,000 per day, including Sundays and holidays.
If this is an impressive statistic now, imagine how it would have sounded to the companies that pioneered the market. MITS, which is credited with offering the first commercially successful PC, the Altair, was amazed to sell a few hundred. Even in 1977, when the first consumer-oriented machines reached the market - the Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II - annual sales only reached 48,000 units.
Gartner says 75% of the first billion were snapped up by businesses. And while the consumer market spawned a confusing morass of incompatible, proprietary and mostly short-lived systems from Acorn, Amstrad, Apple, Atari, Commodore, Dragon, Oric, Sharp, Sinclair and dozens more, businesses went with the company that had dominated data processing for 50 years: IBM.
As Gartner Dataquest puts it: "The big break for personal computers came with the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981. Although the IBM machine was expensive and, in hindsight, carried a certain amount of baggage, it drove ironclad standards into the PC industry. The revolution came from the realization that absolutely standard hardware eliminated the need to create multiple versions of software for slightly different platforms, and instead advanced the software to deliver on the promise of personal computing."
The IBM PC and its clones powered sales from 609,000 a year in 1980 to 15m a year in 1985. And since IBM - fighting the last of a series of anti-trust cases - had based its PC on an Intel processor and Microsoft software, these small companies benefited most from the newly competitive market.
The next period "of particular note", according to Gartner, "is the extended period of strong growth that started in 1993, the result of the introduction of Windows 3.1 and the software-hardware upward spiral that was driven by Microsoft and Intel." That took annual sales from 32m a year in 1992 to 115m in 1999.
The fact that a billion PCs have been shipped does not mean a billion have survived. Few PCs last more than four or five years before they become obsolete. But allowing for hand-me-downs, Gartner reckons about half are still in use.
If the PC industry is to meet Gartner's projections for 2008, then it won't be enough for all today's users to buy new models, though most will. It will also have to sell new types of equipment and reach new people. The most obvious new type of equipment is the notebook PC, around since the 1980s. However, Gartner estimates that 81.5% of the PCs sold have been desktops. Only 16.4% have been "mobiles", with the remainder being servers.
The shift to notebook PCs is noticeable, and Microsoft is hoping to drive it with the Tablet PC design that will be introduced on November 7.
The other hope for growth focuses on "emerging markets such as China, Latin America and Eastern Europe", says Gartner. The US has taken almost 40% of PCs shipped, with 25% sold in Europe and 9% in Japan, markets that may be nearing saturation.
The drive into less developed areas is helped by falling prices. In the early 1980s, a business PC cost about £2,500. A dozen years later, the typical price was about £1,500. Today it is less than £1,000. The fall is even more dramatic if you include the thousandfold increase in power - from 2MHz processors in early computers to 2GHz today - and inflation.
But the future is not assured. One problem Gartner highlights is the "looming spectre" of content protection. The entertainment industry is "pushing hard for powerful legislation that will cripple PCs by preventing them from freely managing digital content. Content protection is shaping up to be a war with economic development at stake."
The consumer electronics giants don't want you using PCs that perform multiple tasks such as word processing, playing games, surfing the net and burning audio and video content. They would rather sell you half a dozen different devices where they retain control of what happens to their content.
The PC industry is planning to introduce the same kind of control through the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (www.trustedcomputing.org), founded by IBM, Intel, Compaq, HP and Microsoft in 1999. Although IBM is building TCPA chips into some of its PCs, Microsoft's approach, Palladium, has attracted most attention.
Will consumers continue to buy PCs that try to enforce digital rights management? You decide.
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