Gartner: Long-Awaited Business PC Refresh Imminent

A widespread refresh of company PCs to Windows 7 must happen in the next few quarters to avoid impacting business productivity, according to analyst Gartner.

In a statement released this week, the analyst predicted that businesses cannot wait much longer to implement a delayed upgrade of PCs or risk damaging their productivity. According to Gartner, the PC estate of most companies is older than at any time in the recent past.

“Businesses that delay replacing much longer risk alienating employees, burdening themselves with more service requests and support costs, and ultimately facing higher migration costs when they eventually migrate to Windows 7,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. “The bottom line is that businesses need to refresh their PCs sooner rather than later. Thus, the full bloom of the long-awaited professional PC refresh can’t be more than a few quarters ahead.”

The analyst has been banging the drum for the mass-upgrade of business PCs in several recent statements and reports. Earlier this month the analyst warned that competition for IT staff with desktop migration skills could drive the cost for upgrading existing machines to Windows 7 to £1200 per PC.

PC Shipments Up

But despite warning about the potential damage to businesses of not upgrading, the analyst pointed to a small increase in PC purchases year-on-year. Gartner said that worldwide PC shipments are projected to total 367.8 million units in 2010, a 19.2 percent increase from 308.3 million units shipped in 2009.

However, the bulk of this increase appears to be down to consumer PC purchases keeping the market afloat, the analyst said. “Consumers buoyed the PC market in 2009 as businesses delayed their purchases. The slow pace of economic recovery and austerity measures in Europe have made PC suppliers very cautious in 2010. However, consumer demand is likely to remain strong even if the economic recovery stalls because consumers now view the PC as a relative ‘necessity’ rather than a ‘luxury’ and will continue to spend on PCs, even at the expense of other consumer electronic devices,” Atwal said.

When it comes to which type of PCs are proving popular, the analyst said that interest in netbooks is waning as consumers increasingly look to cheaper standard laptops and even tablets as more productive alternatives.

“We still think the mini-notebook has a place in the mobile PC market, but not as a substitute for a standard mobile PC. Indeed, the recent decline in mini-notebooks’ share of the mobile PC market reflects a general realisation among buyers that mini-notebooks are less-than-perfect substitutes for standard low-end laptops,” said Raphael Vasquez, research analyst at Gartner.

According to Vasquez, buyers who once would have bought a mini-notebook based solely on its low price now seem more inclined to buy a low-end standard notebook, especially since the prices of the two have converged. “Mini-notebooks are slowly but surely carving out a market niche for themselves as companion devices. However, the emergence of media tablets is a growing threat to that niche.”

Tablet PCs Vs Media Tablets

Gartner makes a distinction between Tablet PCs and what it terms as Media Tablets. The analyst defines a tablet PC as having “a touchscreen size of 5 inches or more, outfitted with a full-function operating system (OS), such as Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP or Mac OS X”. Whereas a media tablet is defined as a “device that has a screen size of 5 inches or larger and is outfitted with a restricted-function OS, such as iPhone, Android and Chrome”.

The analyst includes tablet PCs in its PC market statistics and forecasts, but excludes media tablets from both. However, the analyst said that media tablets will impact the PC market, especially mini-notebooks.  “The iPad hasn’t had much of an impact on mini-notebook units so far, if only because it is generally priced higher than most mini-notebooks,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “However, we anticipate lower-priced iPad imitations will begin to take larger bites out of mini-notebook units as they are released next year.”