Windows 8 causes PC sales to slump

No surprise here!! course I do see the consumers negativity toward Windows 8 to be reversed over time, however I also think Window 8 will have a very hard time taking the place of Windows 7 which is taking the world by storm as XP did.

Tis my .02¢

I don't buy into that.

Computers currently offered for sale all have windows7

Windows8 has not been released yet and I can't believe anyone is
holding out to buy a new computer with Windows8 OEM installed.

What I do believe is that sales of everything is "down" do to the
economy being under the seats in the outhouse.

I don't see the negativity to windows8 going away... EVER.

Look back to Vista... Vista got a bad reputation due to many enthusiastic
people installing it on earlier computers that were marginal for XP.

And while Vista is very useable (even enjoyable) on most dual core computers,
Vista has NEVER recovered from this bad reputation gained in the first
six months after release.... even in the face of the Microsoft
"The Mojave Experiment" ad campaign that attempted to rehabilitate it.

they had to redesign and repackage it as "Windows7"

I agree that it's the economy and the higher prices of hard drives. Also, hardware is oupacing software, which wasn't the case a few years ago. Most computers will handle pretty much anything non-game-related. Why buy a new quad-core PC just so your Word/Excel files run faster?

I agree Alan Their crystal ball must be broken.

Windows 8 is not even on the shelf yet how can it be the culprit.

It can't therefore someone is blowing smoke more rediculous than the obama campaign has been managing lately

I think the bigger impact on sales has been the doubling and tripling of hard-drive prices.

Two years ago (Nov 2010), my sister-in-law bought an MSI i5 notebook for $479 on sale. i5 notebooks continue to sell around that price, or more.

This is an incredibly long-lasting price over a relatively stable product line.

The i-technology has changed generation-levels, but I think it's the HDD prices that have propped up prices AND crushed PC sales. That, and the feeding-frenzy of the "I only want to watch, I never want to DO" iPad-Tablet mentality seem to have fermented into this strange perfect-storm scenario.

On the good-news front, this weekend I see that Fry's is selling 4Tb drives for $250 ("Sorry, only 1 per family!" which is tough because the last time we had to choose between the cat's or the dog's computer, there were serious ramifications).

But the 3Tbs should go back to their $120 retail range, and the 4Tbs should be in the $190 range. That will force all new UEFI MBs and Win7-64 sales.

Allan also brings up the good point about Vista's so-called Life Cycle (which was more akin to The Death Star, I though).

Vista's early bad rep was followed by Microsoft's incredibly quick announcement of Win7's imminent arrival. So "bad rep" plus "next new thing" really crushed Vista, I thought. I never understood if Ballmer knew what he was doing (was Vista so core-based BAD that he knew it had no future, or knew it needed a massive change into Win7 internals?), but he doesn't seem like a complete idiot. Although junking up systems with 300 non-useful fonts really angers me - I've never done that to HIS computer before.

We were putting out 2000+ PCs a year during those two years, and the great majority of those customers are "bleeding edge" types - "I will pay top dollar to have the greatest new thing!" They've done this for 20 years with our company.

But Vista and our red-flag Hold-Off signals weren't just lowering our bleeding-edge maniac temperatures - they were dousing them. And when user conventions show off hot-new hardware on XP running faster with fewer resources than on Win7, that's another good dousing of The Bleeding Edge Factor.

"Will our customers ever get this incentive back?" That's OUR big question. In our smaller market (home theater media RAID servers), it's still going to be HDD Capacity and "Ease Of User Interface to find one film out of 10,000 instead of 1,000 due to HDD increases". In our larger, lucrative audio-market, HDD capacity is the more normal back-office environment, but fast HDDs with good storage (2Tb) is still a desktop requirement, too.

Our computer-installs have been 400 since the HDD Prices went stratospheric, and a third of those have been Necessary Replacements. We still have a big Cautionary Use Of New Dollar Spending On Hardware for our customers just because of HDD expenses. When the Seagate Monopoly wants to start selling a lot, though, all they have to do is make prices reasonable-TO-CONSUMERS again. I did see they made record-profits recently. Gee - no kiddin'.

("Dear Ballmer & Wall Street Pundits: Win9 is REALLY causing these sales slumps.")

Didn't mention the ugly "T" word... tablets have taken the world by storm lately and much of the consumer's budget went for those tablets & smartphones. There is NO money left to upgrade a PC on a cycle less than 5 - 10 years. Innovation has been on the back burner, at chip companies, hard drive manufacturers, and even the video card companies don't have much to celebrate.. when consumers aren't buying in droves... they really don't innovate, they recycle old ideas and give them fancy new names.. These companies also have to thank the fact that a mid-grade PC costs over $1k again.. this is a pyschological cost many consumers will push off for as long as they can.. because companies from motherboard manufacturers to chip makers scheme to make it impossible to upgrade PC's and force you to do massive upgrades, which is really a rebuild/refit rather than an upgrade which would cost a fraction of a newer PC. This is why they've hurt their own business, especially Intel. The bigger they are.. the harder they fall.. for several quarters, they've been dismissing the downturn until it smacks them upside the head with quarter over quater loss they can't hide from the accountants & wall street.