©
The downturn in the PC market will last, at least according to Microsoft, which explains the 39% drop in revenue for Windows OEMs. Incidentally, OEM refers to major hardware manufacturers such as HP, Lenovo, and Dell that sell PCs with Windows preinstalled.
The data is troubling in the sense that the drop in Windows sales is certainly related to the drop in PC sales, given that there hasn’t been a major change to the offering (no move to Linux, for example).
Microsoft itself cited “the ongoing downturn in the PC market and a very strong previous year” to explain the downturn. That the situation is not good was already clear from the data of companies such as Canalys, which reported a decline in the PC market by 29% in the last quarter of last year and 16% compared to the whole of 2021. However, putting this into perspective, sales in 2022 are still higher than in 2019, that is, in the pre-pandemic period, but the problem of a shrinking market remains that cannot be ignored.
The crisis in the PC market won’t end anytime soon as Microsoft predicts a 30% decline in Windows OEMs in the first quarter of 2023. It is likely that sales will return to pre-pandemic levels, but we’ll see.
