Windows 8 not exciting US consumers, retail monitor says
PC sales continue to fall, Windows 8 sales lower than Windows 7 launch –
and sales of Windows 8 tablets 'almost nonexistent'
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Charles Arthur
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 November 2012 07.26 EST
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People arrive at the launch event for Microsoft Windows 8 operating system
in New York, October 25, 2012.
Windows 8 was launched in October, but consumers have yet to warm to it.
Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Windows 8 hasn't delivered any "pop" to US consumer sales of PCs in its
first month, with sales falling by 21% compared to the same period in 2011,
according to NPD Group, which monitors US retail sales.
Laptop sales fell by 24%, while desktop sales fell by 9%, said NPD,
continuing a trend in the US where PC sales have been dropping through the
year compared to 2011.
The report comes days after the chief financial officer of Asus, one of the
world's five biggest PC makers, said that "demand for Windows 8 is not that
good right now", after its executives had expressed doubts about how the new
OS might be received by consumers.
Of further concern for Microsoft, NPD found that consumer sales of Windows 8
tablets were "almost nonexistent", representing less than 1% of Windows 8
device sales through the channels it monitors. But Stephen Baker, NPD's vice
president of industry analysis, said there was one bright spot: sales of
Windows 8 laptops with touchscreens made up 6% of sales.
NPD's report comes just after sources among component makers say that
Microsoft has halved orders for its Surface RT device, which uses an ARM
rather than Intel chip and runs a special version of Windows 8.
A comparison with the same period in 2009, when Windows 7 was also just four
weeks old, showed far greater penetration of the new OS: then, 83% of
Windows devices sold had the newest version. This year, the figure is 58%.
That implies that PC vendors and retailers this year still had substantial
amounts of inventory with Windows 7 even when Windows 8 was launched – and
that this backlog has to be cleared before Windows 8 sales could start in
earnest.
Microsoft Surface tablet is shown at the launch event for Windows 8
Microsoft is said to have halved orders for components for its Surface RT
tablet. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
That would tally with separate findings from Net Applications, which said
that a month after Windows 8's release it constituted about 1% of PC use,
compared to 3.6% for Windows 7 after the same period in 2009.
Consumers buy about half of all PC sales in the US, but demand has flattened
with the rise of tablets such as Apple's iPad; that has had the effect of
diverting consumer spending to other products, and lengthening the life
cycle for PCs. Windows 7 came out before the iPad's announcement in January
2010.
The weakness in PC sales was amplified by a slow "back to school" period in
September and October, said Baker. That's usually a period of strong sales
of Windows PCs as secondary students and schools prepare for a fresh
academic year, and first-time university students choose computers - very
frequently laptops.
But that went slowly, leaving Windows 7 devices with wholesalers and
retailers: "The bad back to school period left a lot of inventory in the
channel, which had a real impact on the initial sell-through rates for
Windows 8," said Baker.
Microsoft's new head of its Windows division, Tami Reller, told analysts
earlier this week that 40 million Windows 8 licences had been sold in its
first month. That compared to an estimated 60m in the first two months of
Windows 7, as calculated by Reuters.
However Reller didn't provide a breakdown between sales to PC OEMs loading
it onto as-yet unsold machines, corporate licences, and consumers buying
online or packaged upgrades to Windows 7. The majority are likely to have
been to PC OEMs. Enterprise buyers can buy "downgrade rights" which let them
purchase a Windows 8 licence but implement Windows 7 on the actual machine.
Baker noted that Windows 8 touchscreen laptops with an average price of $867
(£540), accounting for 6% of Windows 8 laptop sales, had helped "re-
establish a premium segment to the Windows consumer notebook market."
