Personal computer software sales in Western Europe were $522.4m in the first quarter of 1994, a 10% increase from sales for the first quarter of 1993, the Software Publishers Association in Washington reports. Prices are being steadily forced down, so unit sales for the period were up 59%, and the Association said price declines in Europe were responsible for limiting growth in all operating system categories. It reports that application unit sales increased in all but one of the six operating categories tracked, but the increases in numbers of copies sold were not enough to offset price declines and so it was that only applications for Microsoft Corp’s Windows increased year-over-year – they were up 26% to $435.7m. Windows of course remains overwhelmingly dominant, and Windows applications accounted for 83% of all application sales in Western Europe, up from 72% in 1993. Sales of MS-DOS applications plunged by 43% to $52m but were still ahead of applications for Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh: sales of these declined by 9% to $30.7m by value the first quarter 1994 – but then at that time everyone was holding back and waiting for the PowerPC RISC-based Power Macintoshes, which only started to ship right at the end of the quarter. The Association’s figures show that the largest sales regions were the British Isles with $141.9m and Germany, which for some reason gets bundled with Austria – perhaps because they both speak more or less the same language, with $139.4m.
