Solution Providers: Despite Dark Predictions, The PC Market Is Not Dead

PC shipments are expected to decline nearly 9 percent this year on the way to registering zero growth on an annual basis over the next five years, according to projections released Wednesday by research firm IDC.

"That's a tough number to look at," Michael Goldstein, president and CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based solution provider, said of the projected decline.

Still, Goldstein said LAN Infotech hasn't seen demand dry up in the way IDC describes. He said last year was a record year for LAN Infotech's PC sales, and he doesn't expect that momentum to wane.

[Related: IDC: Windows 10, Enterprise Segment Are Game Changers For 2-In-1 Sales In 2015]

"Every year, there's faster and better. New Intel chipsets will be out, Lenovo is shipping laptops with 3-D cameras in it for security, and I'm sure there's a ton of people on Windows 7 machines," Goldstein said.

Goldstein also said certain industries still rely heavily on PCs. "In legal, they're still typing. I can't see them turning around and saying, 'I'm not going to upgrade,' or, 'I'm not going to use a keyboard.'"

IDC's latest forecast shows PC shipment growth declining through next year, and turning back to growth in 2017 as the commercial market picks up. The consumer market will decline through 2019, IDC said.

The forecast is even more disappointing than IDC had previously assumed. The firm expected 2015 to be a transition period as vendors prepared for Windows 10, but "final results nonetheless shrank even more than expected due to a stubbornly large inventory of notebooks from prior quarters and severe constraints posed by the decline of major currencies relative to the U.S. dollar," IDC said in a statement.

IDC also warns that mobile devices aren't the PC-killers the industry may think they are. IDC expects the overall volume of PC, smartphone and tablet shipments to grow by only single digits through 2019, "as saturation and 'good enough computing' sentiments spread even into tablets, which are expected to see further volume decline in 2015."

Lou Giovanetti, co-founder of CPU Sales and Service in Waltham, Mass., said PC market optimists and pessimists are both right.

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The market, he said, "is going to get uglier." At the same time, CPU Sales' numbers are up. Flatness in the market is the result of strong demand being offset by longer-lasting, more reliable systems and customer reluctance to upgrade, Giovanetti said.

"Systems last longer -- it doesn't need to be a faster, stronger, better system every time," Giovanetti said. "A lot of people are not ready to go to Windows 10; they're on a platform that's tested and reliable on Windows 7. I have people buy Windows 8 licensing to downgrade to Windows 7."

Giovanetti said that while notebooks are outselling desktops, making predictions about the future of the market is almost futile.

"Year over year, we're up. I can't explain it, but July was one of our best months in history," Giovanetti said. "When someone asks me for a forecast, I look out the window and say, 'sunny.'"

PUBLISHED AUG. 27, 2015