Charles Smulders Quotations

Emerging markets and consumer demand in the mature regions were the major growth engines on a worldwide basis.

In the United States, installed-base saturation is becoming an increasingly significant factor in determining overall commercial market growth rates, ... Saturation is forcing vendors to deliver new types of systems to maintain solid growth rates.

This bump in sales in the market is due to PCs that were bought around the Y2K time frame. That's certainly slowing down.

Around mid-2005 we started to see the growth in the replacements that had increased, begin to slow and it'll continue to lessen as we move further into 2006. We expect the average system price to continue to fall and though Q4 unit numbers aren't strong, there remains strong pricing pressure.

Vendors will continue to look for ways to reach new audiences. The key determining factor on channel choice is profitability. I don't think we will see Dell moving into third-party retail anytime soon for that reason.

Vendors must find ways to persuade end-users to replace their PCs more frequently, ... Dataquest believes that the new generation of small form-factor PCs will be instrumental in making this happen.

With Vista further out in the future, sales are less likely to slow down now.

The industry did better than expected, due in large part to price cuts by vendors and demand for mobile PCs. Mobile growth came to some extent at the expense of desk-based PCs.

I think it may change buying behaviors of people who were willing to wait until the end of the year. They may choose to buy now instead.

Notebook computers now offer much of the functionality of desktops, and consumers and businesses alike are spending the extra for the added benefit of mobility. In that sense, mobile growth is coming at the expense of desk-based PCs to some extent.