Microsoft News Tracker

Tom Krazit at InfoWorld:

PC shipment growth next year will decline from its current heights, but should still remain strong as users continue to upgrade to notebooks, IDC said Tuesday.

With just 11 days left in 2005, IDC is upping its forecast for 2005 growth to 15.8 percent, up from an earlier prediction of 14.1 percent growth for the year. The Framingham, Massachusetts, market research firm expects PC vendors to ship 207.7 million units worldwide in 2005, significantly more than the company forecast last year and as recently as March.

Next year, however, that growth will slow to 10.5 percent, according to IDC’s forecasts. Demand appears to be strong heading into the new year, but the company is being cautious with its forecast because the runaway growth following the tech recovery of the last few years can’t last forever, said Richard Shim, an IDC analyst.

And most of the growth will be in non-Japan Asia, particularly China. All of which impacts directly the Microsoft bottom line despite the best efforts to sell volume licensing to large enterprises. It also affects the uptake of Windows Vista when it ships, presumably next year. More details by following the link including the projection that laptop volumes will pass desktops in 2008.