Does it seems like all of your friends and family have a PC nowadays? Even my grandmother is e-mailing me now. PC vendors should be happy. A PC on every desk -- that's always been the goal, right? Nothing more to ask for now ... except more desks.

The U.S. PC market has stumbled into what U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray calls a "technology recession." Analysts at Bancorp Piper Jaffray attribute this slump to fourth-quarter 2000 saturation of PCs in the consumer and commercial U.S. markets. In short, everyone's got one.

The worldwide desktop PC market grew 5 percent in 2000, but unit shipments of desktop PCs fell in the United States by 4.3 percent, according to IDC. In late 2000, a weak consumer market brought a downturn in the global market, especially in the United States. The mature U.S. market grew just 0.3 percent year-on-year and declined 3.6 percent over the third quarter. Why? IDC cites weak consumer sales and slow corporate desktop demand.

IDC says the slowdown is a result of both market saturation and faster machines: Users are relatively happy with the speed of their machines, and don't feel compelled to upgrade as often as they have in the past.

IDC predicts that while sales for portable computers and information appliances (i.e., Web/e-mail terminals, gaming consoles, and Web-enabled handheld devices) will continue to climb steadily, the total value of PC sales reached a peak in late 2000 and will continue to slow over the next few years.

Bancorp Piper Jaffray added that it doesn't think there will be much of a recovery in PC sales until the second half of 2002. Analysts with the firm predict that the second half of 2001 will be not be an economic recovery phase but a complete recession in which the PC will see negative unit growth.