No-one seems to be able to ignore what analyst group Gartner has to say about the future and its top ten predictions this week got lots of air time. While we don’t want to offer our own replacement top ten, the Gartner ones are typical combinations of obvious trends, crystal ball gazing and untrammeled idiocy
Remember these are really for IT departments, and not for consumer technologies like those we cover ‘ so whereas ours would relate to breakthroughs for location based applications using GPS on a mobile; mobile video uptake and bigger, clearer, cheaper flat TV screens, Gartner is focused on the older hardware and software markets.
It’s ten, being reached between 2009 and 2012 are simply that:
Apple will sell more PCs because of its cute software integration and iPods
Travelers will dump notebooks for devices that fit in their pockets
Most commercial software will include open source code
A third of business apps spending will be directed by non-IT staff
Companies will replace 40% of Capex with hardware services
Companies will replace a similar amount of Capex on software services
Environmental criteria will be one of the top six for buying at a third of organizations
Most companies will want to know energy and CO2 footprints for PCs
Major customers will need Green credentials for their IT purchases
And finally the idiocy ‘ 3D printers will find their way into homes in high numbers. This one totally threw us, yes it does mean that 3-D designs are carved into resin blocks on these printers. Even if that goes up by 100 fold, it will be the tiniest market we have ever heard of, and this prediction just shows how stuck for ideas the Gartner team is because it is so inward looking at IT technologies.
Throughout there is no mention of radio technologies despite the fact that Wi-Fi has proved to be one of the biggest trends both within and outside the IT department. No mention of WiMAX for long distances, or LTE connections. And of course Wireless USB and better still true Ultra Wide Band technologies will lead to what we call the ‘exploded’ PC. When you have a wireless connection the speed of the internet PC bus, then you can afford to make a PC processing device the size of an iPod, and leave your keyboard and (most of) your corporate data at work on wirelessly attached disks.
This changes the nature of devices on its own, and Apple has already shown it is in the front line, as it always has been, in bringing these types of ideas to market. So of course Apple will sell more PCs.
But they might also have said networks will become autonomous, operate in multiple modes across different distances and become self discovering and self managing, like wi-fi and home networks. Or that screens would become rollable, foldable, higher definition and transition to AMOLED HD quality during this timeframe, making them capable of so much more.
They might have predicted the end of Spam, the end of active virus checks and the fact that Flash memory would create a crash in disk drive pricing, but they didn’t.
If you re-write each of these in the current tense you get:
Apple is selling more PCs ‘ which it is
Travelers complain about heavy notebooks and prefer Blackberries
Software companies hate paying Oracle and Microsoft huge license fees
Lots of business technology spend has always been directed by non-IT staff
Hardware and software is becoming obsolete faster and anyway software services are virtually free (and cellcos give me a handset for nothing)
Most IT equipment vendors are pushing how green they are, so customers must soon start buying into the idea.
All of which are so obvious that the average Wall Street Journal reader could have come up with them over breakfast.