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Consumers to make a fashion statement with PCs

11 Jan '08

3 min read

The Age of Style
Market research firm Forrester Research has predicted that the period between now and 2012 will be the “Age of Style” for the consumer PC industry, with manufacturers weaving design considerations into every aspect of their business, including research and development, brand management, marketing and retailing.

“Fashion is how we express our identities,” says Nadine Kano, marketing director for experience computing at Microsoft. “Style is everywhere today. Look at house wares – everything from potato peelers to handheld vacuums have been infused with style. In the technology world, we've already seen cell phones reach the status of fashion accessory. The shift we're seeing in consumer PCs is just as inevitable.

“Product differentiation in the PC industry is getting harder and harder to achieve based on technical specs,” says Kano. “People have always wanted power, speed and reliability, but these days they can get comparable disk space, processor speed, and RAM from many PC manufacturers. To get something unique, people are now looking for style.”

Fashionable Software?
“Painting a PC a different color is a superficial interpretation of fashion,” says Kano. “Fashion is about lifestyle as well as aesthetics. Go back to the example of house wares – the latest kitchen gadgets aren't just colorful, they're ergonomic as well. Microsoft's hardware partners are focused on more than just shape and color. As they work on their next designs, they are thinking deeply about how people use their PCs.”

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Microsoft is thinking that way, too. The company has done quite a lot of work on the User Interfaces of Windows and Office, not just to make the software look better, but to focus it on the types of tasks that people are trying to complete in their everyday lives. Tasks like editing photos, chatting with friends or creating home videos can have a strong emotional component.

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