A recent MAIT press release announced that household sales in India was driving PC sales. I would beg to differ with this observation, slightly. I think it is the notebook that has changed the fortune of the domestic PC market, and it is not that households have suddenly discovered that it is great to own a PC. The desktop has grown by a measly 4% whereas notebook sales went up by almost 160%, the same MAIT report mentions.

Consider some of these conversations that I recently had with a cross section of usershonestly, I was also surprised by some of these. I was chatting with a friend who is doing a couple of important e-governance projects for various state governments. He told me that in most village-level computerization projects that he is handling, villagers want laptops instead of desktops. Notebooks have long battery life and are easier to handle, as there are not many cables hanging around. Also, notebooks can be carried to other villages, especially by womenfolk, rather than expecting villagers to come to the desktop.

I recently got a letter from one of our readers who teaches at the Aligarh Muslim University. He wanted to know if there are second-hand notebooks available anywhere, in good condition. He is now using his laptop as a teaching aid for his students, and, therefore, needs a machine that is mobile. More importantly, the power supply situation is so pathetic that it is very difficult for him to depend on his desktop.

Ibrahim Ahmad

What used to be an exception about eighteen months ago is now becoming commonplace as far as notebooks are concerned. I am aware of many organizations that are not adding any more desktops now. Whenever a desktop is to be replaced, it is replaced with a laptop. And this is not about large and rich enterprises.

My neighbor told me that the school that his nine-year-old daughter attends is now replacing ten of its fourteen PCs with notebooks. He got to know about it only when the little girl came back one day and demanded her dad to get one notebook for her.

And finally, last week I took my nephews and nieces for a ride on the Delhi Metro train. My jaws fell when I saw the number of youngsters working on laptops while waiting for the train on the platform as well as inside the train. A Metro security guard, with whom I spoke to before getting off, told me that after mobile phones, the next hot item on the list of thieves was notebooks. And the number of laptops stolen on the Metro is rising. While notebooks getting stolen on the Delhi Metro is nothing to be proud of, the fact that we have so many of these incidents now is a real pointer to our future. We have at least so many of them now, that they are being used by people who travel on Metros.

The dynamics of the notebook market have undergone transformation. Prices have dropped, so affordability has gone up. Users, large, medium, small, and even households, are finding it very useful, often advantageous over the desktop. Applications are available that make sense for these users. The impact this will have over sales of related software, peripherals, consumables, and services will also be huge. Though still way beyond cell phone sales in terms of numbers, laptops have the potential to turn the fortune of the Indian IT industry as well as users.

Page(s)   1