The death-knell for the Japanese PC market has sounded. According to IDC, consumers in the land of the rising sun would rather buy flat-panel tellies, cellphones and games consoles than those unattractive beige boxy things that make noise and gather dust under the desk. Even if you pimp the thing up, it still won't sit well next to your new plasma and you sure as heck can't impress anyone by whipping it out of your pocket.
In turning its back on the PC, Japan has become the “first major market” to show a sustained decline (five consecutive quarters). And he world and its dog is pointing to this as the first official evidence that, at last, mobile and cellphone computing are going to supercede life, the universe and everything we've ever known.
They're probably right, but is this really what it's all about? Is this really because mobile broadband is so irresistibly sexy, or is there something else going on? It can't be that, now that most people have their beige box or laptop (and the ensuing debt), they figure they don't need to buy one for another few years, can it?
To marketers and big businesses, our spending habits and entertainment proclivities might indicate that humans have the attention span of a flea. Yet reality tells me that while you can sell any moron upgraded ringtones 25 times in any two-hour period, it's somewhat harder to get people to upgrade the innards of a PC in a similar fashion. Add to this that Microsoft Vista has people assuming their one-year-old PC simply isn't up to running all the eye candy and you can see why maybe consumers have decided to adopt a wait-and-see approach to their hardware.
Is the decline of the PC and the rise of the gaming-device/cellphone/wafer-thin television as much a consequence of a dumbed-down, over-consumerised, instant-gratification society as it is of technological advancement?
People tend to buy stuff because they're told to buy it – sorry, I know YOU are more intelligent than the masses, but this is true. Once we all have the goodies, same as everyone else around us, we need to customise it to express our individuality. A bit like Man-U supporters thinking that “Cantona” shirts identified them as “real” fans, unlike the Beckhamania-types in Asia. You can't really do that with a hulking-great PC, can you?
Outside of a niche grouping of geeks, you're never going to impress your neighbour by wheeling out your new, souped-up megabox. It just doesn't have the cachet of a plasma screen, Wii and a photoframe that will change the baby's nappy. Ergo, it won't entertain you or make you feel good about yourself, and what would happen then?
If you were happy with what you had, you might read a book or a newspaper, and that might cause you to start thinking and – heaven forbid, caring – about what's going on in the world around you. Instead of ignoring the people squashed up against you on a train in favour of “talking” to complete strangers on a “chat” site, you might look up for a few minutes and think about things. Like how crap it is that you endure this long, uncomfortable taxi ride so you can earn the money to buy this phone to impress your buddies and talk to virtual “friends”.
Forget Prozac, people – that's for losers who can't afford the bling technology. And if you live in a Third World economy, you'd better start understanding that until the markets in really important countries like Japan are super-saturated, your only role in any of this will possibly be the manufacture of it in return for $10 a month.
That manufacturers are resorting to tarting up (or dumbing down) their PC offerings in an effort to win back their Japanese customers indicates what all of this is really about. Innovator extraordinaire Sony now offers desktop PCs that fold up to become clocks or can be hung on a wall. Their newest laptop offerings come with illustrations designed by cool “artistes”. Just lipstick on a pig if you really believe that PCs have nothing left to offer. Or the technological equivalent of a 24-carat gold toilet if, like me, you're more practically minded.
No matter how brainless the marketers think the average consumer has become, we still need to work if we are to buy this stuff, and this is why the PC as we know it is unlikely to go belly-up anytime soon. Just ask anyone with a PDA or a Blackberry if they would really prefer typing up a 50-page report on that keyboard. Work will still need to be done on something bigger than a box of matches.
As if to underline this reality, while PC sales are slowing in that other consumer-dominated society, America, IDC says that worldwide PC shipments are actually going to be up 11% for 2007, to an all-time high of 286 million. Japan aside, Asia represents a massive growth area, with sales up 20%. And Gartner reports that PC shipments in Western Europe increased by 17.7% over last year's figures.
So what's with Japan? Maybe that consumer-fad-gadget-crazy country can open our eyes to see what things would really be like if we gave ourselves up to technology completely. Maybe the prospect of being reduced to turning top technology into fluffy pink, kitten-shaped egg timers in order to attract the attention of the bunch of mindless sheep the marketers thought they wanted will be enough to jolt manufacturers into a reality check. Or maybe it won't, but if you pull back from all this in a life-imitating-art sort of a way, you can't help feeling that somebody, somewhere, is getting just what they deserve.
No comments:
Post a Comment