A new market is not just some isolated area. Its emergence means shrinking of some other market segments which now will be losing customers and volumes. In fact, a tablet category has influenced quite a range of adjacent market spheres causing lots of disturbance in general. The first to suffer are, no doubt, netbooks, sharing quite the same functionalities with tablet devices. It did not help much that the price for an average netbook is lower than that announced for a number of tablets. People seem willing to pay more but get a luxury gadget. And, in fact, they are right as a tablet has a very serious advantage a netbook is lacking which is a battery life and a possibility to work without bringing endless cords with you.
Netbooks are not the only victims of the revolutionary gadget. The PC industry is suffering too. Trying to recover from last years' losses when due to the recession all the spending on the office technologies had been cut, the PC market is really experiencing a significant growth. But the expected PC sales are slipping from about 19 per cent this year towards the low teens, showing that consumers are not that interested in buying one. Though rebounding after the recession most enterprises increased their spending on office equipment, the general growth is not that high as it has been expected and is supported due to the increase of the demand at emerging markets. In Western countries consumers prefer to hold on and see whether it is possible to buy a tablet instead of a clumsy set of boxes connected with cords.
Gartner and IDC, biggest research agencies, agree with such statements, though add that consumers are also affected by continued economic volatility which the US is experiencing as well as possible public spending cuts which may happen in western Europe. But these are not all the reasons for below than expected PC shipments. Apple has spent really big money on advertising and marketing its magic gadget while PC companies had really nothing to display. No major events have been planned for this year if compared to the previous one when the launch of Windows 7 was coordinated with major presentations in the industry. Moreover, at the beginning of the year most retailers packed their warehouses with netbooks hoping to make profits but the arrival of the iPad has spoiled all those carefully laid out plans. Now retail chains are reluctant to spend more on PCs dreading to follow the same pattern if the demand for personal computers soars.