Worldwide PC shipments are on pace to grow 15.2 percent in 2008, according to IDC. That's above the analyst firm's March prediction of 12.8 percent growth. But laptop shipments, which have become an increasing force in the PC market, will peak.
Shipments of portable PCs should grow 34.5 percent this year, according to a PC shipment tracker that IDC released this week. That's up from 33.9 percent in 2007 and way above the projected 13.4 percent for next year. By 2012, according to the firm, portables will increase by only 9 percent.
PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard are betting big on notebooks. The company this week released 17 new models, mostly for consumers.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)By the end of the year, PC makers will have shipped 310 million units, close to half (145.1 million) of which are notebooks. The rest are desktop PCs and servers, which together on a global basis still comprise the largest slice of the market, but the difference is disappearing fast.
Portables are especially expected to take off internationally this year, growing from 78 million in 2007 to 109.4 million units this year. That's good news for the industry because notebooks and laptops tend to be pricier than desktop PCs, and they should keep average selling prices higher for a bit longer.
But inexpensive notebooks are stirring up the market too. A reason for the dramatic 40 percent bump in international portable shipments has a lot to do with how the numbers have been counted, according to IDC.
The firm said it had previously not included the rapidly growing low-cost mininotebook segment because of the "use of nontraditional PC designs, including the use of embedded or custom operating systems, (as well as) reduced processing power and storage," IDC said. But now, due to the popularity and computing robustness of the Asus Eee PC, the Classmate PC platform from Intel, and OLPC's XO, mininotebooks are included. Plus, the firm notes, the volume of units shipped are actually rising.
Those three manufacturers have some company in the consumer space. Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and perhaps Dell already have, or plan to release, their own tiny laptops.
Gartner seems to have checked its former open-source blindness at the door, and is now suggesting that 90 percent of all software-as-a-service providers will adopt open source in their infrastructure by 2010.
Cost cutting will lead to the move, said (Gartner)...Open source will be used in the operating system, application server, and at a database level and will make up 30 percent of an application.
Of course it will. Open source is the foundation of software innovation in the 21st century.
One big question remains, however: will open source provide SaaS' free lunch or will there be a quid pro quo? With AGPL and the Open Software License, it will be the latter. With 20th century open-source licenses, however, SaaS gets a free ride.
The more open-source software we want, the more open-source software we should be prepared to pay for, whether in cash or contributions. This is a fair exchange, and will provide the basis for a robust SaaS software economy for many, many years to come.
Paula Rooney of ZDNet has some bad news for those promoting Linux. According to a Gartner report, Linux's cost advantages are soon to dissipate and software as a service will soon eclipse Linux as "the preferred IT cost-cutting method" (by 2013).
If true, in both cases Linux and open source win. What's not to love?
In the first instance, open source long ago ceased to be dependent on winning through cheapness. Yes, many CIOs still look to open source to deliver cost savings, but people aren't switching to Novell and Red Hat to save a buck, just as few (if any) have outright dumped Red Hat's for Oracle's discount Unbreakable Linux.
It's not about a price tag. It's about value, as Red Hat's Michael Tiemann emphatically stated at OSCON a few years back.
If Linux's TCO goes up relative to its proprietary competition, so has its value. Perhaps Gartner is simply predicting that Linux vendors will finally get paid their due?
This isn't exactly how Gartner sees it:
... Read moreWorldwide PC shipments will hit 293 million units in 2008, up 10.9 percent from 2007, due in part to sales in emerging markets, Gartner said Tuesday.
And although price cuts will occur, revenue will grow around 6 percent for the year, George Shiffler, research director at the firm, said in a phone interview.
That's a good sign. In recent years, revenue has stayed flat from year to year despite unit shipment increases. In 2003, for instance, a then-record 152.6 million PCs were shipped, but they carried an estimated value of $175 billion, or about the same as the the 136.7 million PCs shipped in 2002.
Both the revenue and unit shipment figures also refute the argument, which we've heard about every three months since 1997, that the PC market is dead. PC shipments have increased nearly every year over the past three decades.
There are, of course, danger signs. The weakness of the American economy could hurt PC sales, and there's a rising possibility of a slowdown in China after the orgiastic buying spree leading up to the Olympics.
Emerging nations continued to be a big factor in the market. PC shipments to emerging markets grew 22 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, accounting for 60 percent of worldwide PC unit growth. PCs started to sell in significant numbers to emerging nations at the start of the decade, but most of the PCs went to urban hubs like Beijing and Bangalore, India. By 2004, manufacturers started to more actively come up with designs and distribution strategies to better target these nations.
But desktops also surprisingly look strong. The last desktop replacement cycle occurred in 2004 and 2005. Those machines are not old. Another replacement cycle should occur from late 2008 to early 2010. Replacement sales account for nearly 60 percent of PC shipments worldwide and 80 percent in the states, according to Shiffler. (And make me want to break into song: "In the year 2525, PC shipments will cross the 17.8 billion mark, according to industry figures.")
Gartner has made 10 technology predictions for the next few years, and in the analyst firm's view, life has never been better for open source.
Among the predictions: Apple will double its market share by 2011 and software-as-service will account for at least one-third of all business software spending by 2012.
But it was open source's gain that I found most interesting. Gartner doesn't speculate on how much open-source vendors will make or anything like that. Rather, Gartner talks about how much open-source code will make it into those bastions of proprietary, so-called "commercial software":
... Read moreBy 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment.
Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. Embedded open source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years.
I'm not sure who Gartner talks to when it puts together its famous "Hype Cycle" reports, but I'm finding it hard to believe that it talks with enterprises. I was recently reading through its "Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2007" report, and was astounded to find out that I've been tricked by paying customers into believing that they were, well, paying.
This chart comes from Gartner's 'Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2007.'
(Credit: Gartner)To wit, Gartner suggests that we're years away from enterprise adoption of the following open-source software categories:
- Content management (5-10 years);
- Enterprise Service Bus (5-10 years);
- J2EE Application Servers (2-5 years); and
- IP Telephony (2-5 years).
Does "mainstream" mean that everyone has already bought it? Or does it mean that a wide cross-section of the market is adopting it, and not merely the proverbial "early adopters"?
If the latter, I heartily disagree with Gartner.
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