Dell Looks to VR, AR, Voice to Help Drive Future PC Sales

The focus of last week's Dell EMC World 2016 show was largely on enterprise IT, which shouldn't come as a surprise given the newly combined company's strengths in such areas as servers, data storage, virtualization and the cloud. But officials with Dell Technologies made sure to stress that PCs, despite the continued shrinking global market, continue to be a crucial part of the company's end-to-end strategy, and that even in a consolidating space, Dell is gaining ground. CEO Michael Dell noted during his keynote address in Austin, Texas, that the company has gained PC market share for 15 consecutive quarters, and Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of operations and president of Client Solutions at Dell, said that there are 275 million systems sold each year, and that the leaders in an increasingly-consolidating space only have about 20 percent of the market. There is plenty of room to grow, Clarke said. In addition, emerging technologies like speech and gesture recognition, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will significantly change how users interact with their PCs and what they will be able to do with them, he said during a roundtable discussion with journalists at the show. IDC and Gartner analysts earlier this year showed a global PC market still in decline, with shipments in the third quarter falling year-over-year between 3.9 percent (IDC) to 5.7 percent (Gartner), with total units shipped between 68 million and 69 million. IDC analysts had a fairly optimistic view of the future for the space, noting efforts by industry players to use new chips and operating systems to develop systems that are faster, more mobile and more secure, which will reap rewards down the road.

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