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CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HOME MARKET
Price-Driven with Special Requirements
Home users traditionally have more limited budgets and tend to be far more price
sensitive than business users when it comes to buying personal computers. However, price
is not the only deciding factor. In certain respects, such as a machine's graphical and
musical capabilities, home users are very demanding and have very specific requirements.
Vendors such as Atari and Commodore were quick to recognize the fact, and developed
PCs that provided fairly sophisticated graphics and sound capabilities at a modest price.
Amstrad's PCs are successful because they provided IBM compatibility at a low price. But
the PC1512's integral design and the bundling of inexpensive, cut-down versions of
professional software were also imponant factors.
Figiue 1 shows the business/home breakdown of the European market and Figure 2
shows the percentage penetration of PCs into European households.
Increasingly Sophisticated Applications
Home users have always differed from business users in terms of their needs and their
motivation for buying a PC. Businesses purchase PCs to increase their competitive edge,
either by computerizing individual tasks or by installing more encompassing management
tools. Home users typically buy for yet another set of reasons, which now stretches well
beyond the traditional leisure and hobbyist activities. Currendy, the basic application for
PCs within households is still the home/hobbyist application. However, educational or
instructional usages, as well as "household productivity or commercial" applications, are
gaining in importance.
Educational applications include both the more sedentary education activities usually
associated with parents and their children, and the more specialized activities of students.
Of these, the student "home campus" market is cuirentiy the most developed and
sophisticated. Students are also the most mobile members of the educational population. As
laptops become smaller and lighter, and as more vendors introduce IBM-compatible
notepad-size PCs and "palmtops," students are likely to become a major driving force in
the development of this lightweight PC market. However, a major price/performance issue
still needs to be solved by the laptop vendors before laptops become really successful in
the student market
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