Who says nothing exciting is happening in the PC business?
Mature markets are notorious for stagnation and need some kind of outside stimulus to wake them up. The American car industry lost its mojo after peaking in the 1960s and ’70s and it took imports from Japan to make them get their act together. I’d argue that in two of the three they still haven’t, but that’s another story.
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So it goes for the PC industry. After so many competitors came and went, we had settled into HP as the number one PC vendor, Dell at number two, and everyone else far behind them. That was pretty much the case for six years.
So here comes the shakeup.
In the just-ended third quarter, Gartner says the Lenovo Group Ltd. has dethroned the long-running king HP as the top-selling PC maker in the world. IDC, meanwhile, said HP is still at the top.
Gartner said that Lenovo’s share of the PC market grew to 15.7% in Q3 2011, or 13.77 million units, compared with 15.5%, 13.55 million units for HP. This was the first time HP has been knocked from the number one perch since 2006.
HP had a pretty quick response.
“While there are a variety of PC share reports in the market, some don’t measure the market in its entirety. The IDC analysis includes the very important workstation segment and therefore is more comprehensive. In that IDC report, HP occupies the No. 1 position in PCs,” the company said in a statement.
IDC puts HP’s Q3 share at 15.9% with 13.9 million units while Lenovo was number two with 15.7% and 13.8 million units sold. In both cases, Gartner and IDC are in agreement on one thing: HP sales took a nosedive, around 16%, while Lenovo is on the rise, up 10% year-over-year.
It’s not the fairest of comparisons. Lenovo is based in China, which is a thriving market, while HP is U.S.-centric and the U.S. is a basket case right now. The loss of PC sales is certainly reflective of the loss of faith in HP over its painful contortions in the past year, and even though Meg Whitman seems to be cleaning up the mess, you don’t turn a battleship on a dime.
Then there’s Vizio. The company is following up on the launch of desktop PCs with a trio of laptops it calls “thin + light,” but the rest of us call “Ultrabooks.” They come in one 14-inch and two 15.6-inch models and definitely qualify as Ultrabooks. The 14-inch model is just 16mm thick and 1.55 kilos, while the 15.6-inch models are 17mm thick and 1.76 kilos. That’s not much larger than the dimensions or specs of a MacBook Air.
They aren’t cheap, which has been Vizio’s stock in trade. Part of it is due to the fact they have SSD drives, not standard hard disks. They start at $849 and go up to $1,199, depending on the configuration. They are for sale now on Vizio’s home page.
Then came this interesting posting on the Valve Software forums: “We’re looking for folks to come to Valve and playtest both released and unreleased versions of our games as well as play around with some of our hardware prototypes.”
There have been rumors of Valve getting into the hardware business in one form or another, but no one has been able to nail anything down. The strongest rumor has been that the firm is developing wearable PCs. It looks like we will know soon enough.
What we do know is that the PC market is getting interesting again.
