I noticed something very curious Friday in the financial news. Microsoft’s stock dropped over 5% in one day. The headline went on to say that the main culprit was the drop in sales of the windows operating system. The largest drop was in netbook sales which were down a whopping 40%.
The main reason given was the adoption of tablet computers… Specifically Apple iPads.
Apple actually had larger net income figures than Microsoft.
It seems like people are opting for the more convenient touch screens of a tablet computer than a laptop or netbook computer.
This has certainly been the case for me.
I get most all of my news and information on the iPad as well as Email, Facebook and Twitter. My old netbook hasn’t seen the light of day for months. My laptop gets occasional use, but I prefer to type on the iPad (with it’s self correcting keyboard) and use Evernote to transfer text to desktop applications.
At work, the full size dual monitor setup is still the way to go for spreadsheets, webpages, and data programs. Programs like MS Word and Excel are still vital productivity tools. This was shown in the sales figures. While Microsoft had sales increases for its Office line of products, its Windows operating system numbers dropped. Apple may be gaining over the PC here as well. Apple sold 28% more Macs in the quarter. Office for Mac 2011 has some good reviews so you may not need a PC for office productivity at all.
So it seems like we have a breakout. The standard computer with large monitors and MS Office installed are still doing well for businesses, but the tablet computers are replacing net books and to some extent laptops for mobile computing.
Have you seen this where you work?
