PC corporate upgrade cycle
It's kind of comical to hear all these analysts year after year waiting for "the corporate upgrade cycle" to kick in with some kind of big jump in PC sales to replace all those old and decrepit PCs bought in late 1999 to prepare for Y2K.
Apparently they think the 250+ million PCs sold in the last 2 years were all for all those brand new employees that all these corporations have been hiring. Nah, it's not like they could have been steadily replacing the existing PC base or anything.
If you assume that corporate America was expanding its number of employees in need of computers by 5% a year, and apply the rest of sales to replacement cycle, what you find is that -- even if the replacement cycle wasn't lengthening -- the number of PCs sold each year, even through this "downturn" have been more than sufficient to replace existing PCs on a rolling annual basis.
There is a rolling replacement cycle, not some kind of monolithic, all-at-once flood of orders, and it's gone on relatively unabated through the first three years of the new decade.
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