Report: Microsoft's Windows Likely To Help Modest PC Growth In 2015

[engine]

I'm surprised the report talks about 2015 being growth, and not 2014. I was thinking it would be showing already.
I've helped a number of friends stuck on XP to choose and buy new PCs in the last few weeks, and they seem to have adapted to Win 8 reasonably well.
No doubt the big numbers are likely to come from corporate sales where adopting new software and the associated training is probably holding back the numbers.

Modest growth is reported, which is not too bad considering the years of declining sales.

Microsoft’s Windows OS could play a crucial rule in returning worldwide PC shipments to modest growth next year after multiple years of decline, Gartner said on Monday.

PC shipments could reach around 317 million in 2015, increasing from 308 million units expected to ship this year, the research firm said in a study. Shipments this year are expected to decline by 2.9 percent compared to 2013, which is lower than previous yearly declines.

The “revival” of the PC market will be driven by upgrades of old business PCs with Windows XP, which are no longer supported by Microsoft, said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. He estimates that roughly 60 million PCs will be upgraded this year.Report: Microsoft's Windows Likely To Help Modest PC Growth In 2015 [pcworld.com]