Research firms Gartner and IDC today released their preliminary calculations of PC shipments for the third quarter of 2013, finding that worldwide shipments fell by roughly 8% over the year-ago quarter, extending the current sales slide to 18 months. Top worldwide vendors Lenovo, HP, and Dell held up reasonably well, but smaller vendors such Acer and Asus experienced dramatic year-over-year declines in of around 22% according to Gartner and 34% according to IDC."The third quarter is often referred to as the 'back-to-school' quarter for PC sales, and sales this quarter dropped to their lowest volume since 2008," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "Consumers' shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets. A greater availability of inexpensive Android tablet
