Shared wisdom
Peddie wasn’t the only market researcher to share their wisdom with us this week as IDC’s Eszter Morvay gave us her assessment of the UK PC market in Q2. In a nutshell, tonnes of laptops are being sold but the main reason for this is that everyone’s dropping their pants on prices.
Amazingly, the average selling price (ASP) of a laptop in the UK is now barely higher than that of a desktop. Only a few years ago it was more like double. Of course a big factor in all this is the rise of the sub-notebook, or Basic Ultra Portable as IDC is now calling it. With prices starting at £200 they’re bound to push ASPs down and the trend looks set to continue.
Yesterday we heard from the director of HP’s Automated Infrastructure Lab, John Manley, who discussed the reasons behind HP’s recently announced collaboration on cloud computing research with Intel and Yahoo. Manley revealed that he expects the cloud to function in a similar way to the Web, but for services, and could have even greater impact.
To finish off the week we spoke to mobile phone operator O2 about its relatively recent entry into the UK broadband market. PR manager Nick Wilkins revealed that O2 thinks it can compete with the established players by offering superior reliability and customer service.
O2 isn’t the only company to come to that conclusion and we hope it’s part of a growing trend away from commoditisation and an obsession with price cutting and towards a culture where people aren’t afraid to pay for quality. That certainly wouldn’t do the tech industry any harm.
