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| Shifts In The Computing Landscape. Asus, Lenovo, and Apple? |
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 Several fundamental PC market shifts are beginning to take place in an unlikely realm. The United States. With heavy hitting brands in the U.S. like Dell and HP at first glance it would seem we're quite well served here, but with the changing landscape of computing itself comes opportunity. Despite the fact that overall unit sales growth is slowing in the U.S. due to saturation and the fact that most actual growth is shifting to newer and less economically developed markets, this is really only true in the commodity desktop market. A market already under huge price and profit margin pressures. Solution? Cater to growth categories and higher margin product lines.With the increasing desire for mobile connectivity, smaller form factors, and the continued strength in the laptop market, players in the asian manufacturing sector are beginning to see the U.S. and it's affluent populace ripe for targeted marketing in these high growth, and high margin niche markets. Also some market missteps by the Dell gang the last many quarters have loosened the reigns on the U.S. market to some degree, a degree largely exploited up to this point by rival HP . Asustek , a quite familiar name to people in our enthusiast community and a huge player in the ODM design market, are already making their retail brand presence known here through outlets such as Best Buy as well as traditional component outlets like TigerDirect and Newegg, but not solely for selling mainboards and video cards anymore. Asustek's "EEPC " flash based "micro laptop" is a runaway success story, and along with it's own line of traditional mobile products it has lofty goals for itself. How lofty? Try twenty percent of the PC market within the next few years. As one of the worlds major manufacturers of "other peoples stuff" and the largest mainboard supplier in the market this may not be as lofty a claim as it sounds. Acer's recent purchase of Gateway gives it infrastructure and instant brand recognition in the U.S. that it intends to leverage into market growth, with aggressive growth intentions rivaling the claims of Asustek. Additionally Acer is making its presence felt at retail in the same outlets Asustek persues. Chinese firm Lenovo also has lofty goals in the U.S. and plans to announce it's official entrance into the U.S. retail sector at CES next week. Previously Lenovo has restricted itself in this country to marketing IBM's Thinkpad line in the business sector, but with mobile being the only real growth sector out there in the commodity PC market Lenovo wants their piece of the American consumer pie too. Lastly, and ironically, we discuss Apple . Though Apple already has a significant market presence in America, it's home market, the increasing growth of the mobile sector along with Apple's powerful retail brand recognition on the back of its iPod and iPhone product lines is finally showing some signs of paying off in it's computing line, with some predictions putting Apple at nearly 10% market share by the end of this year. Already you can see just how strong Apple is in the mobile sector, with retail outlet Amazon selling more Apple mobile systems this holiday season than any other brand. Here in the U.S. PC's have become as ubiquitous as toasters. They're no longer niche items for the neighborhood geek. They are appliances people use to get things done. What is changing is where people want to work, how they want to work, and how they get the most important thing PC's exist for. Information. People are increasingly wanting it wherever they go, in their lap, in their pocket, and it's equally clear the landscape of computing itself is changing fundamentally because of this. Welcome to America! Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           
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