World-Wide PC Shipments to Improve, No Thanks to Windows 7

World-wide PC shipments will be lousy in 2009, but not quite as lousy as previously thought. Gartner says they’ll fall six percent for the year, which is an improvement over the 6.6 percent drop it forecast last month and the 9.2 percent decline it projected back in March.

“PC unit growth was stronger than we expected in all markets but Eastern Europe in the first quarter of 2009. In particular, consumer shipments were much stronger than we anticipated,” said Gartner’s George Shiffler. “However, professional shipments continued to struggle, and we think much of the growth in consumer units was due to vendors and the channel restocking inventories rather than an upsurge in demand.”

Well, hopefully that will all change after the October launch of Windows 7, right?

Nope. Not according to Gartner (IT), anyway. Unless Microsoft (MSFT) is planning another $300 million ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld.

“Unless Microsoft mounts a major marketing campaign in support of Windows 7, we think consumers will simply adopt the new operating system as they would normally buy new PCs and/or replace old ones,” Shiffler said. “As for professional users, we still expect them to put off adopting the new OS for at least a year until they have fully tested their applications against it.”