Month: November 2012

Traditional PC units (desktop and notebooks/netbooks) are in secular decline, consistent with most investor expectations that have observed the cannibalization of this market by smartphones and tablets over the past several years and the data points over the past two quarters that point to not only slower growth but an actual decline in unit sales year over year. Many of us still have a notebook, but we just don’t use it as much since we adopted a smartphone to function like a BlackBerry and an iPad to take notes and access email and content on the web.

There are things we still need a notebook for, so we bring it along when we know we need it, but we don’t upgrade as quickly as we used to (and we don’t drop it as often),

We think many users do not care about Office functionality; their needs are for content consumption and ability to access the internet and note-taking. Where there is a need for greater functionality in content creation, Office should be an important lever to anchor productivity users to the Windows platform. The desire to have one device instead of carrying both a tablet and a notebook (also a smartphone of course) would work to Microsoft’s advantage, particularly if Apple is predominately selling the 8 inch iPad mini, where the screen is more limiting as a productivity device.

We expect Microsoft to leverage the collaboration capabilities of Office 2013 by putting the ability to read and edit an Office document on the iPad in 2013 and maybe on Android as well, but not the full functionality of Office that would have greater cannibalization potential to Windows. To increase the ability to share documents, this is important to be cross-platform, particularly if the other platforms are measured in hundreds of millions of users.

Microsoft has already made available a limited