I know this is long so summary: The market is down 90%. All these companies don’t think it’s coming back. They think there’s a strategy in play here to deliberately kill the personal computing market to end ownership and force rentership.
I know this is long so summary: The market is down 90%. All these companies don’t think it’s coming back. They think there’s a strategy in play here to deliberately kill the personal computing market to end ownership and force rentership.
All the companies involved are in the market for self-build or refurbish work. Can’t really say if it’s also affecting the general PC market, sounds pretty likely though.
It wouldn’t even be very hard to takeover the enterprise PC market with rental compute. That actually sounds easier than killing off the gaming/hobbiest market who will hold out longer because they like ownership. Businesses on the other hand will just look at it in a pure economic way and if you give them cloud compute that’s cheaper than ownership they’ll take that.
I’m guessing there would be issues with security. If nothing else, the IT staff that specialize in security won’t like rental PCs, and they have pretty significant sway within most enterprise environments. But then again, people are already renting servers in data centers anyways. A lot of enterprise PCs are just glorified clients for whatever servers and web app they have to access, which is why refurbished enterprise PCs are (were?) a great choice for buying relatively cheap PCs that have pretty good specs for their price tag and not too much wear in them since they were mostly used for Teams and Outlook.
Part of the economic proposition put forwards to execs will be “you won’t have to pay your security salaries anymore” because it won’t be your problem, it will be cloud compute’s problem.
Hell, most enterprise computers are under some kind of rent or lease scheme already. When I had an office job they would replace my ThinkPad every 2 years or so because the company didn’t own them, they just paid a fee for a machine x or y years old.
It makes very little sense financially to have money parked in computers unless it’s absolutely mission critical, when you can just write the rental cost off much more easily