Choice Is Good, RIGHT? (Part 1)

Posted by meelahi on October 11, 2012 02:22 am 5

Us PC users always boast one thing(amongst others) over Mac, we have choices. PCs come in different brands, shapes, monitors, configurations, case sizes, OS versions, with crap-ware or signature and so on. A moderately savvy user will be able to get exactly what he/she wants in the PC. Now I believe this is what drive down price and computers are now everywhere. Bill Gates' famous dream of putting a PC in every home has surpassed even the dream, now every home has multiple computers, one for every person!

Now the situation arises right here. 10 years ago PC was common, affordable and not DOS like scary any more. People are buying them and using for variety of tasks. But now that instead of one computer per household it has become three computer (I am just putting up a number) per household, the main demographic of computer user has changed. It may sound a bit snobbish and it likely is, instead of technologically aware/trained people using computer, now every tom, dick and harry uses it. Don't get me wrong, I am not against it nor do I mind, but I am talking about the effect of this phenomenon.

When everyone is using and buying computers, now a large majority don't care about all the stuff that made the PC platform so great. Partly because all computers are more or less powerful enough to handle basic tasks such as word processing or browsing (facebooking in particular), partly because they don't understand the differences, try explaining to me the difference between painting styles. Now what they want is a device that's a safe choice. They don't want to go through all the spec sheet and see the greatness of it. When they go to a store to pick up a computer they end up buying one which is supposed to "Just Work" without verifying or even trying to the verify the correctness, validity or sensibility of the statement, because frankly they are not able to.

So that brings me to the question, is giving choice actually hurting the OEMs?