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The article says next to nothing and then points to report by Diego Lo Giudice that costs $499 to read. What happened to the review process on slashdot? Pull this crap from the website!! report URL https://www.forrester.com/repo...

By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.

Bullshit. I work with robots and automation in my day job. This is a complete fabrication. We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years. End of story. Will not happen. The technology just isn't even close to being there yet.

The summary and article are a poor representation of the Forrester document. Look at the summary of the original here. It focuses primarily on cubicle work, office drones, assistants, etc. And it says 7% by 2025. The self-driving car / truck aspect is further in the future.

I wanted to read the full report. You can too if you go here:
http://www.forrester.com/Market+Update+Office+2013+And+Productivity+Suite+Alternatives/fulltext/-/E-RES102262

$2495 for a fucking survey? Get fucked Forrester. Now there's no way for me to verify if the survey is legit or not.

What is missing from the timeline is the time they blew up a huge project. I remember reading about it in the early 90's but can't locate the source, so I give you Wikipedia: basically they blew 125 million and 3.5 years of development work and AMR (American Airlines parent company) was sued by Marriot, Hilton and Budget (partners in the system) for the failure.

Then back in 2009, AMR hired HP to develop a new system for them, which was seen as very risky.

Now, it seems that they have thrown in the towel, what is it with AMR that it can't get a fucking system going after 20-something years?

When laptops plummet in price, so do margins on laptops.

I feel there's still money to be made in the high-end market, and I do not feel laptops will ever match desktops in performance/$. If you have two components of the same architecture, same performance, the one that is larger in size is probably cheaper to produce.

Also, passengers cars will never catch on...how will people move around their pianos?

Taking your car analogy further, trucks and larger vehicles are still being sold today; they are still useful. There are still pianos that need to be moved.

So I am puzzled when you say:

Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time

Some use cases/applications that I can think of that would benefit from the higher performance of a desktop:

1. PC gaming market is still going to be around
2. Growth of 3D media, I certainly see a need for higher performance computing here
3. Media creation/editing (3D modeling, video editing, etc.)

What's more, in the future much of the "power" in our computers will come from the Internet. You probably won't even need to store or edit your music, movies, and other files locally for long—we're getting better wireless network drives and Internet-based storage systems, and soon all your media will reside in a central location (in your house or some far-off server farm) accessible to all your machines.

Given that people will have remotely-accessible storage residing in the home for their portable devices, I could also imagine people running a more powerful personal server machine in their homes.

Perhaps your mobile applications can offload expensive calculations to your home server, who knows? Bringing the data center to the home, in a way.

And so I feel that's another area where there's a need for more powerful stationary computing.

The article references a Forrester Research report, and the article really missed an important point in the original report:

http://forrester.com/rb/Research/us_consumer_pc_market_in_2015/q/id/57210/t/2

http://blogs.forrester.com/sarah_rotman_epps/10-06-17-steve_ballmer_right_pc_market_getting_bigger

Desktops aren’t dead. Fewer desktops will be sold in 2015 than in 2010, but in 2015, they’ll still be used by more consumers than any other type of PC.

When laptops plummet in price, so do margins on laptops.

I feel there's still money to be made in the high-end market, and I do not feel laptops will ever match desktops in performance/$. If you have two components of the same architecture, same performance, the one that is larger in size is probably cheaper to produce.

Also, passengers cars will never catch on...how will people move around their pianos?

Taking your car analogy further, trucks and larger vehicles are still being sold today; they are still useful. There are still pianos that need to be moved.

So I am puzzled when you say:

Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time

Some use cases/applications that I can think of that would benefit from the higher performance of a desktop:

1. PC gaming market is still going to be around
2. Growth of 3D media, I certainly see a need for higher performance computing here
3. Media creation/editing (3D modeling, video editing, etc.)

What's more, in the future much of the "power" in our computers will come from the Internet. You probably won't even need to store or edit your music, movies, and other files locally for long—we're getting better wireless network drives and Internet-based storage systems, and soon all your media will reside in a central location (in your house or some far-off server farm) accessible to all your machines.

Given that people will have remotely-accessible storage residing in the home for their portable devices, I could also imagine people running a more powerful personal server machine in their homes.

Perhaps your mobile applications can offload expensive calculations to your home server, who knows? Bringing the data center to the home, in a way.

And so I feel that's another area where there's a need for more powerful stationary computing.

The article references a Forrester Research report, and the article really missed an important point in the original report:

http://forrester.com/rb/Research/us_consumer_pc_market_in_2015/q/id/57210/t/2

http://blogs.forrester.com/sarah_rotman_epps/10-06-17-steve_ballmer_right_pc_market_getting_bigger

Desktops aren’t dead. Fewer desktops will be sold in 2015 than in 2010, but in 2015, they’ll still be used by more consumers than any other type of PC.

There's an e-book market?

Yes. It's difficult to get estimates, but at least several hundred thousand at least have been sold. This estimate puts 2009 sales figures at 3 million units in the U.S. alone. Anecdotally I would have to agree—I don't have one but a number of my friends do. Several hundred thousand readers minimum isn't world shattering, but yes it is a market.

If what you are interested in doing is finding a mechanism by which to gather, sort, and rank innovations or ideas, there are a number of software vendors that can be useful. One of my personal favorites is CrowdSound, which offers an embeddable widget for doing just that. There are many, many players in this space, and you can find a short list at: http://blogs.forrester.com/vendor_strategy/2008/12/innovation-vend.html I work at a company called Xpree, which specializes in tapping the wisdom of the corporate crowd a little later in the game. We provide collective forecasting (prediction markets) from scenario planning onwards to demand planning, supply chain pricing, product quality, and other metrics. We use a well-incented and anonymous gamelike structure, and allow your company's employees to provide agile truth-without-consequences forecasts.

There are free-as-in-beer email servers, even for very high volumes of mail, that any competent IT staff could maintain with minimal effort and better reliability than GMail. How much money do you think GMail would save? Is that amount of money actually worth the hassle of dealing with GMail?

According to a Forester report, they estimate that it costs on average $25.18 per month per user to provide email services in-house, compared to $8.47 for Gmail.

Interestingly, most people couldn't actually guess what the real cost of providing email services in-house was, many guessing $2-11 per user.

The upshot of Forester's analysis was that up to around 15,000 users, it could be substantially cheaper to outsource email as an infrastructure service.

Admittedly, there can be a lot more to the calculations though. Depending on your business needs or industry, you could have regulatory or compliance requirements that might interfere with an outsourced solution if the vendor can't meet those requirements.

The Forester report: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,46302,00.html

Arstechnica report on the report: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090108-report-gmail-about-one-third-as-expensive-as-hosted-e-mail.html

so if I don't buy the report ($279) I can leave my PC on?

But on the other hand, a Forrester research report from September 2003 (available through ZDNet's Whitepapers if you have an account) stated:

SOME FIRMS MODIFY OPEN SOURCE CODE; MOST DON'T
Sixty-four percent of our experts say that they view source code; 40% modify source code (see Figure 4). Firms that modify source code are also likely to be bigger open source users -- they use almost four open source products on average, twice as many as those that don't view or modify code.

And you seem to be forgetting the fact that opening up source code allows other software development companies (or individuals) to work on it.

It is clear at least one writer -- the author of this piece at Web Worker Daily -- thinks that the iPhone should be left on the dresser in the morning. She offers several reasons that the device isn't a good corporate tool.'"

At least, that's the conclusion coming out of Forrester, whose analyst Benjamin Gray, lists 10 reasons why the iPhone is not yet ready to be an enterprise-class mobile device.

Microsoft are the real owners of the SGI OpenGL patents and are blocking this entire show by insisting on those anti-GPL RAND terms for the licensing... not SGI...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/16/sgi_transf ers_3d_graphics_patents/

http://www.smithhopen.com/news_briefs_display.asp? ID=301

http://www.forrester.com/Research/LegacyIT/Excerpt /0,7208,28681,00.html

that last is is a doozy... they want $99 for a one page article...

Microsoft has nVidia over the certification barrel... if they make the nv driver support 3D, then nVidia may find it very difficult to get their windows drivers certified... they're having enough problems at the moment...

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt /0,7211,40858,00.html

If only Bernoff could find a rock, or maybe a pile of Zunes big enough to hide his pudgy bulk beneath.....

Forrester Confirms: iTunes Sales NOT plummeting. It's just slowing growth.

Geez.

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211, 40858,00.html Here's a link to the actual Forrester report. Requires subscription or purchase.

I don't think either company can talk about enterprise search. Both of their enterprise products are suited only to the smallest of enterprises and are not customizable enough to do much more than indexing corporate intranets. There is a lot more to it than that. Before either company claims their turf maybe they need to take a look and realize neither owns the enterprise search market right now. There are several bigger players in the market right now, FAST (www.fast.no), Autonomy/Verity (www.autonomy.com), and several others that offer way better feature sets and performance, and have much bigger market share. Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt /0,7211,38355,00.html

I like to think I'd do a bit of research before making such an egregious comment.

Forrester Research: "39% of consumers say their next TV will be a flat-panel plasma or LCD TV set."

Variety: "Elsewhere in its 'The State of High Definition Television 2006' report, Kagan estimated that 9.1 million HD sets will be sold to consumers this year, compared with 3.4 million and 5.6 million bought in 2003 and 2004, respectively."

You were right to be skeptical of HDTV up until two years ago, but now we are seeing a curve similar to DVD adoption. I would submit that your position is no longer supported by the sales figures.

Do you remember the brand trust article that everybody was talking about not two weeks ago? Where did Lenova sit there? for reference: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060330-6491 .html from the site where you order the study (which im not about to do) http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt /0,7211,38694,00.html itemBose, Dell, IBM, Pioneer, Zenith, And Philips Have The Most Brand Potential Where is Lenova? Oh wait, its not there. Ok, so formerly, Thinkpads were being manufactured by a well know, respected, and establised company. Now they're being manufactured by a relatively unknown company. Clearly racism is the driving factor.

He's talking about the stupid headline, "No One Watches Online Videogame TV", which doesn't even fucking describe the article. It's not even the conclusion the article author himself makes. The article doesn't even have a real conclusion, except that he was wrong and he's probably wrong again.

Now the article isn't the holy grail, it's far from it. It takes a Forrester Research report worth $249.00, imho misuses it and throws in his own two cents. If the author had come to the conclusion made in the headline I would have been all over him, but he doesn't he actually brings up a couple of valid points. Such as:

For 99 percent of enthusiast press articles, print tells the story more quickly, more succinctly and more easily than video. Readers can browse, skip around or read the whole article. Plus, if the story links to a specific video, the readers once again have total control of their content.

Video broadcasts in their current form just aren't convenient and until they are comprehensive, navigable, and user controlled, online viewers will continue to find it much easier to skim web text.

I'm too bored to finish this post, but whatever.

He's talking about the stupid headline, "No One Watches Online Videogame TV", which doesn't even fucking describe the article. It's not even the conclusion the article author himself makes. The article doesn't even have a real conclusion, except that he was wrong and he's probably wrong again.

Now the article isn't the holy grail, it's far from it. It takes a Forrester Research report worth $249.00, imho misuses it and throws in his own two cents. If the author had come to the conclusion made in the headline I would have been all over him, but he doesn't he actually brings up a couple of valid points. Such as:

For 99 percent of enthusiast press articles, print tells the story more quickly, more succinctly and more easily than video. Readers can browse, skip around or read the whole article. Plus, if the story links to a specific video, the readers once again have total control of their content.

Video broadcasts in their current form just aren't convenient and until they are comprehensive, navigable, and user controlled, online viewers will continue to find it much easier to skim web text.

I'm too bored to finish this post, but whatever.

The report is a survey of consumer brands, using a sample of 4,732 households, in a sample that size I would say it's quite likely to have some degree of error in it. A sample of business or technically savvy people would of course yield a completely different result.

Hmmmm.... the report actually refutes this. It states...

Microsoft, Sony, Panasonic, And HP Have The Highest Brand Adoption

Nooooo... Apple my friend.
Apple's doesn't actually dominate in many markets at all. Off the top of my head I would say it's dominance would be limited to that of graphic arts, video post production, and of course most recently in walkman devices through it's IPOD range. Whilst I can see it's domination of the (tiny) graphical arts market continuing for some time to come... I think it's IPOD market is extremely short lived. Who is going to buy an IPOD when every mobile phone on the market supplies equivalent functions ?

Apple is the master of blowing away markets... and then blowing it's markets.

The publically available summary of the research doesn't give much information on whom was surveyed. Perhaps the survey group was primarily composed of small businesses, which make up the largest number of enterprises here. Those businesses would likely not be using servers, which is where you'd expect to find more Linux users (cf. the desktop).

The survey aside, there are lots of companies using Linux in New Zealand (including yours truly). In a week's time we are hosting one of the three biggest Linux conferences right here in Dunedin. And even companies like Microsoft are making the most of Linux down here.

The end is perhaps not quite nigh.

--
One of those rare antipodean companies using Linux

If Microsoft gave a rats ass about Mono or any of the work done related to Mono, they would have squashed it a long time ago. From all reports, Bill is flattered by Mono...and although Ballmer gets irritated when people ask him questions about it, I suspect he doesn't really care either.

Folks. Microsoft spends $6 billion dollars on R&D every year. They are building C# 3.0 and designing C# 4.0. The direction of C# is going towards a more functional programming capability. They are on the verge of delivering XAML, WPF, and WCF which will alter the way applications are designed and developed on Windows Vista. The new technologies will have no relation to what mono is doing now or even what .NET 1.1 is doing now.

They don't care because they're taking the whole development game up a notch. If you're developing applications in anything these days you should be paying attention not to what we develop in today, but what we will develop in 5 years from now. It will not resemble anything available today.

There's an article by Carl Zetie at Forrester on these new technologies and how they will impact future development. I highly recommend reading it:

The original is here: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt /0,7211,38241,00.html

The free link is here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/c/5/7c51c 83b-d873-40ce-9405-7f792927eeca/Why%20WPF%20Will%2 0Dominate%20Rich%20Client%20Development.pdf

Mono is not threatening Microsoft in any way shape or form. Get over it.

David C.

Personally I thought it was a particularly good year for Sun's Sparc processors - see this Forrester research article for example. Here are some recent Sun SPECjbb performance benchmarks against IBM's Power P5.

But since Sun isn't a leading Linux advocate, I don't expect them to get Slashdot front page coverage like IBM seems to...

Maybe but this analyst mentions a few reasons you may want to restrict the audience for a posting.

Charlene Li has

which article costs money to read?

This one. In the slashot story it is the link on the word "controversy".

There's a one paragraph blurb claiming "But IT managers beware: Greasemonkey will cause you nothing but headaches, and may even be a good reason to delay that Firefox pilot you're planning", but giving absolutely no reason. If you look on the right it says:
Buy this research
Price: US$49.00
Report Length: 3 pages

I really don't think Slashdot should bother linking to a page with absolutely NO information on it and requesting a payment to get info.

-

• Dude, RSS feeds are pretty cool: $249 for 6 pages (and it's only the first in a series!)
• I think users should control their own browser settings: $99 for one page
• Netscape is on the way out (written 6/03): $99 for one page

• Dude, RSS feeds are pretty cool: $249 for 6 pages (and it's only the first in a series!)
• I think users should control their own browser settings: $99 for one page
• Netscape is on the way out (written 6/03): $99 for one page

• Dude, RSS feeds are pretty cool: $249 for 6 pages (and it's only the first in a series!)
• I think users should control their own browser settings: $99 for one page
• Netscape is on the way out (written 6/03): $99 for one page

So I run off in hopes of reading the controversy and it says I need to pay $49.00 to "By the Research"? What gives? Anybody have any worthwhile information to spare us broke college kids a little cash? Or, is my exam fragmented brain missing something that should be obvious?

Price: US$249.00

Report Length: 5 pages

A 1000-pages book should cost US$498.00!!!
It's stupid book with the worth of heavy 10 oil-barrels.

Wait a moment ...

I will go to buy a cheap book (US$60) from www.amazon.com.

Absolutely. Charlene Li at Forrester Research posted about this today, calling personalized search results the "Holy Grail of search" and giving an example from Marissa Mayer at Google of how Google's personalized web search might work.

Oh yeah, every year for the last several years. Examples follow"

March 2003

July 2003

November 2004

December 2003

http://www.gartner.com/
http://www.metagroup.com/
http://www.idc.com/
http://www.forrester.com/
http://www.idg.com/
http://www.jupiterresearch.com/
http://www.yankeegroup.com/
http://www.aberdeen.com/
http://www.amrresearch.com/

And yes, they all cost money. If you're an enterprise and you want input on how to spend you tens-of-thousands to multi-million-dollar IT budget, you can shell out a few more dollars to get some research.

I have been keeping an eye this forum for quite some time now, as part of my daily intelligence gathering, I find the robust exchange of views, and technical arguments make an interesting diversion from some of the other corporate bullshit I have to deal with in my working day. I also read corporate intelligence reports from the Gartner group, Forrester, the Meta group, and Olsen Online Business Intelligence Services. Slashdot has often proved to be far more accurate when it comes to the technical details,and I am often amazed at the incredible levels of intelligence and insight shown by its readership, some of whom demonstrate a knowledge of Linux and Operating systems far in advance of anyone I have ever met, even in the IS department of major corporations. For this reason, I feel I should contribute my 2c to the debate about the future direction of Linux and the whole Open Source movement in general.

I feel I can do my bit for the Open Source community by offering (free of charge) some of my hard-earned knowledge straight from the bloody trenches at the front-line of tech-Marketing. Normally I would be paid over $4000/day for my perspective, but Slashdot - this one's on me. You people can think of it as my small and unworthy attempt to "give something back" to the Community.

Why Linux/Open Source has an image problem in major US Corporations and what the community can do about it. Like any movment, political or religious, Open Source/Linux has its Leaders, High priests and Gurus. These high profile individuals represent the public face of the organization. Like it or not, these people are associated with the product in the eyes of the buying public. One of the first things the Linux movement must do in order to gain acceptence by middle-America and Joe-and-Jean Sixpack and their 2.4 kids, is to develop what we in the Marketing profession call a "Happy Face".

When Joe Sixpack drives past a McDonald's, he associates it with the smiling face of Ronald McDonald the clown,and quality food served quickly. When he is choosing a collect-call company, the smiling face of Al Bundy (of TV's Married with Children) springs to mind, and when he thinks of fried chicken in large capacity bucket-like containers, it is the image of the happy-go-lucky avuncular Colonel with his associations of good old Southern hospitality that sticks in his memory. (In marketing terms this is known as a "positive association". Because the image puts the consumer into a "buying-receptive" mental state).

Linux/Open Source lacks any kind of "Happy Face". Now this in itself is not a problem, were it not for the fact that Linux has several extremely high-profile advocates who are the exact opposite of "Happy Faces" in that they invite negative associations into the consumers head and put him/her into a state known by Marketers as "passive-aggressive sales-message rejection" (In layman's terms they don't want to buy the product).

Now, I will not lower the tone of the debate by naming names. I will give a few brief profiles and community members will know who I am talking about.

In reverse order of harmfullness we have the laconic, dour nothern European. Not known for his sense of hunor, and with far too many nights spent coding when he should have been o

According to this article the problem is worse

Their logic seems to be windows IP will bolster Solaris!?! Wow.

Betcha microsoft or some exec who gets a bonus paid for that report.

Depends if you can pay an "IT reasearch firm" to put their name on your marketing material or not.

BTW, here's the report....if you have 900 USD to get it:

The Forrester Report

For example:

Interviews where they explicitly say that they wouldn't have done the deal except that it puts pressor on IBM.

That "Where we use their intellectual property, there will be a royalty stream. Where they use ours, there will be a royalty stream back."

that Forrester somehow thinks this is good for Sun - I bet he thinks the SCO/MSFT partnership's good for SCO too. It's sad to see Sun turn into just another SCO. Can I get a "+1 Sad" mod?

The issue of exactly how much of an effect piracy has had on the sales slump is a hotly debated one. It's not just the record companies that are screaming "piracy!". Forrester Research, a highly respected analyst firm, states that the amount of the music industry's sales drop due to piracy has been overstated (that should be no surprise to Slashdotters), but also states that the record industry will indeed lose $3 Billion due to piracy over the next few years.

"And except that when sales drop, it's never ever because the products are shit, but "due to piracy"."

This one you can work out on your own. The huge explosion in music piracy, as well as the slumping economy are variables. Shitty music, nostalgia notwithstanding, is a constant. About the same amount of crap was foisted on us in the 80's and 70's and, I'm sure, earlier; due to the nature of how our memory works, we tend to only remember the good stuff. Perhaps you've stopped buying music becuase you've gotten off of that popular culture train (as do we all at some point) but IMHO, the quality of music isn't an issue, as it's a constant that can be reduced from both sides of the equation.

I think the economy and the explosion in piracy are the big factors here. The economy is a factor in two ways: there's the group that would only buy music but don't, and then there's the other group who otherwise wouldn't resort to piracy but are doing it due to the loss of their job or another economic effect.

"And isn't it simply amazing that the recording industry actually knows how much people would be buying, but aren't?"

Not really -- any industry beyond a certain size will spend a lot of brainpower on market analysis. This involves hiring a bunch of geeks who have postgraduate degrees in statistics in marketing. I am quite sure that the toilet paper industry knows a scary amount about our toilet paper buying habits, as well. There are also plenty of third-party companies that do this sort of research, such as Forrester Research, which I mentioned above. Another analyst firm has available for sale a report on how my particular industry is going to fare over the next seven years. Obviously, nobody can predict the future, but a lot of people spend a lot of time and money doing their best to try to.

"Except that distribution is controlled by a semi-monopoly, so there is no real competition."

This is the part I don't understand. I know of plenty of indie labels; I've even known some indie label owners personally. There must be hundreds of them. The record industry has its "Big Five", just as the accounting firm industry has its "Big Seven" (or whatever it is nowadays) and Detroit used to have its "Big Three", and if you counted Dell, Gateway, and HP they'd have the majority of the PC market, as well. But none of these examples define a "semi-monopoly."

"I tell retailers they need to get out of the plastic business," said Josh Bernoff, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, titled "From Discs to Downloads." "Two-thirds of the people who currently download say that when it comes to music, it isn't important to them to hold a physical object. They're done with the CD. They just care about the songs."

So: even among downloaders there's still a group, one third of the total, that does still find it important to "hold a physical object." I have to believe that among non-downloading music consumers the number of people still interested in the "physical object" is essentially 100 per cent.

The question then is how many non-downloaders purchase music? And among the downloaders that are interested in the physical object: is the physical object really important to them? Also, from the Forrester "Quick View" of the "Discs to Downloads" report:

• Proliferating on-demand media services will overtake piracy.
• In five years, 33% of music sales will come from downloads.

It's more like 70% for big companies.
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/0,1338 ,17096,00.html

It's not saying they're *exclusively* using linux, and it's unclear whether this is server or desktop.

Wish that report was public. Here's a summary of the report. This one is interesting too. If you have to login, u:billmonroe p:banjo.

-Paul

Wish that report was public. Here's a summary of the report. This one is interesting too. If you have to login, u:billmonroe p:banjo.

-Paul

According to this story over at the Washington Post, a study conducted by Forrester Research has "predicted" that online music distribution will kill off compact discs as a music distribution medium.

While this may seem painfully obvious to most of us here on /., since the suggestion comes up in almost every RIAA related article, it is good to see an "authoritative" organization come up with the same prediction. They may be heard better by the record companies and the entertainment industry.