Why Dell thinks it's a great time to be in the PC market
At a press conference at CES this morning, vice chairman Jeff Clarke noted that more than 300 million PCs still ship every year, and while sales in the overall industry are flat or falling, that actually benefits the big guys like Dell as smaller PC makers are forced to consolidate.
Right now, Dell, Lenovo, and HP control 54% of the PC market. Clarke believes that by 2020, that number could rise to 75%.
Clarke pointed to the success of the XPS line-up of high-powered consumer notebooks and hybrids and its advances in materials to suggest Dell would continue to be one of the big three for the foreseeable future. He also noted that Dell's pending buyout by EMC will turn it into a full-service enterprise company - businesses want to buy everything, from servers to networking equipment to PCs to tablets, from a single company, Dell believes.
So, for Dell, even if the PC pie shrinks, a bigger piece of that pie is good news.
In a conversation with Business Insider, Clarke also said that Microsoft's new Windows 10 operating system isn't necessarily affecting consumer PC sales just yet, but he's very bullish on it for enterprise PC sales, saying that he thought it would be Microsoft's fastest-adopted operating system ever in businesses. According to Microsoft, 76% of companies are already testing it.
A couple of resellers we talked to at the event, however, said that a lot of businesses are still opting for Windows 7 or Windows 8, citing security concerns and legacy apps that don't run as well on Windows 10 as their reasons. This seems odd, as Microsoft is touting Windows 10 as its most secure operating system yet, and it's a lot closer to the familiar old Windows than Windows 8 was. But businesses sometimes move slowly into the unknown.