The PC is broken: Time to fix the business model or quit

Grim news for PC makers: they face a stark choice, either to overhaul their business model or just quit making PCs in the next few years. Analyst Gartner expects the number of PCs in use to decline from around 1.48 billion last year to around 1.33 by 2019, which is going to make life a lot harder for the companies that sell them. "The PC business model as we have traditionally known it is broken," said Tracy Tsia, research vice president at Gartner. While the top five mobile PC vendors have picked up 11 percent market share over the past five years (from 65 percent in 2011 to 76 percent in the first half of 2016), that has come at the expense of profit, Tsai said. Gartner predicts that the installed base of PCs will continue to decline over the next five years, which means continuing erosion of revenue and profit for PC vendors.