Research finds PC unit sales increases to slow to 9.3 percent in 2011

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Significant changes in the world of enterprise IT and the role of computers in general have caused the experts at Gartner Research to predict a slight slowdown in sales for PCs in 2011.

"Moving forward, PCs will no longer be a market by themselves, but part of a larger device market that ranges from smart televisions to the most-basic-feature phones. Within this market, consumers and professionals will increasingly use the combination of devices that best suits their particular needs," said research director Ranjit Atwal.

While the end of the recession will mean that the business community will support faltering consumer sales of PCs somewhat, according to Gartner, other experts point out that the advent of cloud services could cut into the enterprise's demand for its own hardware.

Nevertheless, others say that even cloud data has to be stored somewhere, and that cloud service providers could make up for the demand drop-off from end-users by buying up enough servers to store the enormous amount of information their clients require.