PC Market Faces Identity Crisis

Growth in the PC market is stagnant, Microsoft couldn't get people excited about Vista if they stapled it to a ham sandwich (an actual product SKU at one point) and some observers are saying its time to rethink the whole personal computing deal.

IDC analyst David Daoud says the one-size-fits-all PC model has gotten stale, and PC makers are going to have to start addressing specific market segments if they want to be involved in anything more exciting and lucrative than a commodity market.

Mini-devices, similar but not necessarily based on the UMPC hold promise, as do tablets and speech-recognition, Daoud says. The key will be having a big company to design and market the bejeebers out of those categories, as Apple did with the personal media player.

Apple didn't create the MP3 player. But it has been able to create an ecosystem which brought the hardware, the software, the content, content delivery, marketing, ownership of the entire ecosystem. And on the PC side, the PC manufacturers have not yet done that in a way that would have them differentiate themselves.

Has the PC Become Antiquated?[BetaNews]