Outsourcing responsible for hardware slump

Outsourcing IT labour probably has much to do with it too. Here in Edmonton, CA, a city of ~one million lost all it's big IT contracts including IBM, Dell, and Convergys. In excess of 5000 jobs lost. While it's debatable how many of those people had real IT skills, regardless that's going to factor into reduced hardware sales locally.

The reason for it _is_ outsourcing, not the advent of cloud computing and software as a service. These technologies are nowhere near market drivers yet.

People aren't upgrading computers because they have outsourced their hardware and the outsourcing vendor charges an utter fortune to update equipment.

For example at my company I ended up buying a laptop online £700 cheaper than the same laptop through our IT contract.

THAT is why no-one is upgrading hardware. Outsourcing vendors quote low to get the initial contract and make profit from change requests and upgrades and low and behold it makes companies stick with that they have for much longer than they want to.

@Glenn
to be fair, the market got saturated by corporate schools. If you remember in the 90's everyone was studying to be a lawyer, then that got mucked up. Then The same thing happened to IT, all this corporate technical schools killed it.
Now they are after the Nurse assistants and court reporters. You can still catch commercials from Devry, Itt tech, Lincoln, University of phoenix. The same thing happened with the housing market, every night there was an infomercial on flipping houses. All without using your money.

It would be more serious to claim that Twitter and Facebook are responsible, since they don't need all that many resources to waste time with.
Come on, who actually uses cloud computing ? Has it become a multi-billion dollar business overnight ?
Don't think so. Cloud computing exists mainly in the dreams of the marketing people who are trying to push us consumers to go to a loan structure and get away from the ownership structure we have now.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, it will remain a pipe dream. I have zero confidence in giving my personal details to anyone on the web. I have even less confidence when it comes to storing my personal data on some server I'll never see, via a connection that has unknown reliability.

Cloud computing is no where near before it to become a grand success at least it should work inside a corporate.

Outsourcing is no where related to hardware slump IMO, its the software is not catching the speed of hardware there is no real application which uses all 4 cores of a CPU yet.

Then comes the real saver,virtualization my workplace has 20 VM's distributed using 4 or 5 machines other wise those would have been atleast few more servers.

Fortunately windows is driving the hardware growth because of its resource hogging or feature "rich" system, if linux dominates the world then we may not need more than quad or octal cores for atleast next decade.