Study Indicates New Trends In Home PC Use

A new study conducted by market research firm Inteco Corp. highlights the shifting use of PCs in American homes. According to the study the number of American consumers using their home PCs to access the Internet continues to climb while the average amount of time being spent using a home computer holds at a fairly level rate.

Inteco reports that while time spent on a PC for online personal applications grew 60 percent from 1996 to 1998, there has been virtually no growth in total PC hours per computing household per week.

In 1996, the average American household with a PC used it 17.5 hours a week and in 1998, the average per week use of the PC in computing households was the same, according to Inteco. Also since the average number of PC users per PC household grew from 2 to 2.3 between 1996 and 1998, the time spent per PC user actually declined from 8 to 7 1/2 hours a week, the research indicated.

According to Mark Snowden, Senior Analyst for Inteco Corp., there are three factors contributing to the 60 percent growth rate in time spent using the Web for personal, non-work applications. These are flat-rate/unlimited use pricing available from Internet service providers, increased and more far-reaching ownership of high-speed modems, and the development of more tangible internet applications.

In other findings, Inteco said that more PC time is now being spent on games and use of the Internet for personal applications while being used less on productivity applications. Inteco said that some productivity time has shifted to portable PCs brought from the office for work at home.

The firm also highlighted that productivity applications themselves have markedly increased in effectiveness as they have migrated from stand-alone to Internet-based tasks. One example, investment monitoring, which used to require the laborious process of locating and keying stock prices into personal finance hardware is much easier as an Internet-based application where the numbers can be automatically accessed.

(Contact: F.R. Dulaney of Inteco Corp., 203/866-4400 ext. 23, e-mail fdulaney@inteco.com)