Society and business in the 21st Century
This is a presentation I gave earlier this year to the Forest Computer Pals group.
We looked at the pros and cons of Vista and whether it was worthwhile for people to make the jump to the newer system.
Gartner reports that less than 50% of second hand PCs are making it into the resale market. I’m surprised it’s that many given the restrictive software licensing, particularly for Windows.
I imagine the supply is going to dry up even more over the next few years as people start to hold onto their computers for longer.
Where we’ve seen business computers last three to five years I expect we’ll see the life of office and basic home PCs blow out to eight to ten years.
There’s three reasons for this; web based applications, little innovation and the recession.
The recession is a no-brainer. As I posted previously, computers purchases are deferrable and as money gets tighter users won’t replace them until they are throughly flogged.
This isn’t such a bad thing for users as there’s little compelling reason for buying a new computer if the current is working fine. For the majority of users who surf the web, type letters and do the odd spreadsheet they could get by with an eight year old computer.
Running eight year hardware becomes even easier if you’re running web based apps. As long as your system can run a reasonably modern browser, all the rest will follow.
This raises big problems for the bigger vendors. They are going to have offer some pretty compelling reasons for buyers to junk their old systems.
In the meantime, buyers of used systems might find the market remains tight.
Further to Saturday’s post, I’m researching my story on wireless Broadband for tomorrow’s Smart Company column and I find Telstra are still offering the $0 laptop.
I thought it had been dropped. It’s amazing this offer gets no mention at all.
Gee it’s hard to make sense of Telstra’s website.