That’s a bit harder to answer.
Well, if you’re Jane or Joe Average, you’ll have probably spent pretty much the same again on stuff to enhance your PC, from anti-virus software to graphics card upgrades. IDC have been looking at the “beyond-the-box” purchases and for every dollar spent on the PC, you spent $1.05 on extra bits’n’bobs in 2009.
This is up from only $0.87 per dollar in 2008, partly due to the fall in price of PCs but overall the market is worth $28.6 billion, which is pretty healthy, regardless.
IDC also said, “PC users have moved en masse toward a Web-centric environment, and cloud-based activities are on the rise. In contrast, productivity-based activities have become a secondary focus among consumers.” I’m not 100% sure what this means but I think it’s saying that PC use is moving away from writing letters and balancing bank accounts and into entertainment from YouTube, Facebook and Spotify. No surprises there then.
The Research Director, David Daoud, went on to say, “With the trend of a multi-PC per user environment, the accessories market will play a growing role in insuring seamless integration of all the devices in businesses and households. The need for solutions to enhance user experience, improve productivity, and secure users’ computing environment mean that the accessories market will continue to expand going forward.”
Translating…as people increasingly have more than one computer, e.g. a PC and a netbook, they’re having to spend more money making everything work together. Absolutely true. They’ll need a Wi-fi access point for the netbook, a NAS to share files, a printer with a print server and external HDDs for backup (yeah, right).
So, the next time you are budgeting for a PC, think of a number and double it.
I believe that “productivity-based activities have become a secondary focus among consumers” is a rather convoluted way of saying that Internet-related activities have become the primary focus overall of computer users. Productivity-based activities have not lessened, but have likely increased. It’s just that there’s a new top use, making computing devices more useful overall, which really is good for the greater computing device market at large.
When hobbyists started experimenting with early personal computers, many of them didn’t know what they might use them for. It turned out that they were good for word processing, accounting and playing games. Little did they know that eventually there would be a drive to connect every computer to an ever-evolving global network.
Computer accessories such as printers are a commodity replacement market. Printing isn’t nearly as important to me today as it was, say 10 years ago. My printer at home is rarely used. I have a couple of scanners and use those more frequently than the printer, but again scanners are a commodity item that don’t have to be replaced very frequently. More important to me are hard drives, network attached storage, and clever software that will allow me to leverage my hardware investment.