Hewlett-Packard’s announcement this week that it’s discontinuing its TouchPad line and intends to spin off its PC business is another sign of how rapidly the market for personal computers are being destabilized by tablets and smartphones.
Microsoft has seen weaker Windows revenue this year, a result of a decline in overall PC sales. The Windows division is the Redmond software giant’s second biggest source of revenue. The PC trend is not new. IBM sold off its business in 2005, and other PC makers have struggled over the years.
According to IDC research, computer makers are expecting to ship only 4 percent more PCs in 2011 compared to 2010. Meanwhile, tablets are selling briskly, according to a New York Times article Saturday:
Global sales are expected to more than double this year to 24.1 million, according to Forrester Research. More than two-thirds of those tablets, however, are sold by Apple. Sales of its iPad pulled in $9 billion in just the first half of the year, or 30 percent more than all of Dell’s consumer PC business in the same period. The joke in Silicon Valley is that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market. (That was also true of Apple and the iPod market.)
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