Windows Vista Renews PC Industry Hopes
Sometimes the march of technology can lull us to sleep. Consider the personal computer. Even as PCs have developed insane levels of memory and power, enabling fantastic storehouses of videos and photos, the machines themselves have gotten less exciting. Owning a PC once felt like dipping a toe in the future. Now the device is as revolutionary as a refrigerator.
So for many buyers, price is the biggest factor. And that helps make the industry brutal for PC makers — a trend that came into sharp focus in 2006.
Worldwide PC sales were on track to grow a healthy 10 percent for the year, but not without turmoil. The top two vendors, Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., stumbled through internal strife and endured a third quarter in which U.S. PC sales actually dropped for the first time since 2002.
And yet at the dawn of 2007, PC makers are talking a big game, arguing that buyers should open their wallets a bit wider than usual. The occasion? The new Windows Vista from Microsoft Corp., the first new Windows PC operating system since 2001. It hit the business market Nov. 30 and goes to consumers Jan. 30.
Windows runs 90 percent of the world’s PCs and is expected to bring Microsoft more than $14 billion in revenue in its current fiscal year — almost all of which stays in the company as profit.
However, the launch might be an even bigger deal for what Microsoft likes to call the Windows “ecosystem” — the sprawl of companies that sell PCs and assorted software and services. According to a Microsoft-commissioned study by the IDC market research firm, every dollar of Windows revenue translates into $18 in sales for someone else — in the U.S. alone.
PC makers are hoping Vista spurs more computer sales, to be sure, though that…
