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The billionth personal computer was shipped in April of this year, according to a new report by Gartner Dataquest, which predicts the second billionth by 2008.
The industry reached the 1 billion mark in April 2002, approximately 25 years after the release of the 1974 Altair, which contained the 8080 Intel chip.
The report, which was published on Monday, predicted that the industry would continue to experience consolidation over the next six years, prior to the sale of the second billionth PC. It pointed to PC manufacturing giants like Dell and Hewlett-Packard as examples of companies that could shape the industry by realising efficiencies and economies of scale in the PC market.
The report also predicted that the cost of PCs would have to fall dramatically to facilitate the sale of PCs to new markets.
"With the wealthy heart of the PC market consumed, PC manufacturers face the challenge of lowering costs to address opportunities in emerging markets, such as China, Latin America and Eastern Europe," said Martin Reynolds, vice president of Gartner Dataquest and author of the report, in a statement. "Lowering costs will be the greatest challenge for the industry in the next six years."
Reynolds anticipates that the PC will become the central appliance that manages all household communications and entertainment in the future. He anticipates that PC-technology will proliferate throughout the home, in a range of low-cost devices that form an extended network. However, he believes that broadband exceeding 10 Mbps would need to become widely available before this could happen.
Reports from the Computer Industry Almanac, Nielsen//NetRatings and eStatNews reveal that 60 percent of US households have PCs, followed by 49 percent in Western Europe and 38 percent in Asia Pacific.
At the end of 2001 nearly half a billion people had access to the Internet from their home, and USD615 billion in revenue was generated worldwide from e-commerce transactions.
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