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While interesting, these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work which limits it to just a few people using Android with these apps.

These apps may not be useful to *you*, but they will certainly be useful to governments, a few companies, and some of the more vigilant/paranoid tin-foil hat wearers among us. In any case, what we need is a free open source solution that does encryption.

The number of Android users is not that big right now, but Android is coming very fast from behind, and with Google taking 0% of the commissions from their Market/App stores (leaving the entire 30% in perpetuity to the carriers/phone makers), I speculate that Android will really become the #1 dominant platform eventually.

I really don't understand the hate, the iPhone, FOR THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WHO USE SMARTPHONES, is a great product.

There you go again, using that word "majority". Unfortunately, even looking at just smartphones, you are wrong. Scroll down near the bottom of the article. Worldwide smartphone sales have iPhone pegged at 15.4% market share for the first quarter of 2010.

So, again, we arrive at that little word "majority". See that name at the top of the list? Yeah, the one that says "Symbian" with 44.3%? THAT is the majority...because it's the highest number. It doesn't matter how much it dropped in the last year, it doesn't matter if you think it sucks, nor does it matter how much the iPhone increased. The fact is, as of right now, the iPhone is not the majority of cell phones being sold, whether it's feature phones or smartphones.

Last time I checked, Apple has both larger revenues and larger profits than any other manufacterer of consumer desktop and laptop computers on the market. I'd be happy to "lose" like that too.

I don't know about revenues and profits, but in terms of units sold, the top 6 worldwide are HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, and Toshiba according to Gartner's 1Q 2010 report released on April 15th.

Microsoft is clinging to market share like a rat to the last scrap of cheese on the trap. How are they gonna fare over the next decade?

er... an 85-90% OS market share in the desktop PC market is nothing to sneeze at.

Despite being in second place in the video game market (worldwide; they're in first place in North America) Microsoft makes money hand over fist, thanks to the suckers^Hpeople who buy Xbox Live subscriptions... they pay approximately $50/year to have what PC, PS3, and Wii users have for free.

Apple is INVENTING new markets. How do you compete with a player that doesn't just change fields when you've finally figured out the rules, they essentially change planets...?

See what I said about Xbox Live subscriptions? Microsoft invented that market. Microsoft also had a fairly early online game store for the 360, even though Valve's Steam service for PC predates it (Steam being the original "app store").

Sony used to be good at this, but they lost their vision somewhere after the Walkman, probably right around CD players.

It's interesting that you would say that. The Sony PlayStation was forward thinking. Sony realized in the early 90s what Nintendo and Sega didn't; that 3D games were the wave of the future (Sega Saturn had better 2D capabilities) and cartridges were a limited format that would hold games back (Nintendo stuck with cartridges).

The PlayStation 2 built on the PlayStation's success to become the best selling video game system of all time.

Sony tried something new with the PS3 and it backfired on them, mainly because it cost too much to produce. Apparently they don't have Jobs's Reality Distortion Field to make people buy overpriced iPads^Hgadgets. Then again, the PS3 also had to play catch-up with the Xbox 360, which had already been on the market for a year.

At the time, Jobs was still smarter than Gates. Still is. Just different games. Gates went for world domination, and got all the headaches an emperor hates. Jobs went for market domination, and is still leading in pretty much every area they care to develop in.

Except the PC market. According to Gartner's January 13 press release, the top five companies in PC sales worldwide in Q4 2009 were HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba.
The top five companies in PC sales the US in Q4 2009 were HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, and Apple.

Gartner has yet to release its 2010 Q1 data.

Apple TV is the only loser I can think of, and the iPad will own that market soon enough.

I haven't done a lot of research here, but I'm guessing that Apple TV failed because of its price point. It does nothing more than any Xbox 360 or PS3 can do, and those are not that much more expensive (in fact, the cheapest model Xbox 360 is cheaper than the Apple TV, but it doesn't include a remote). Even the music streaming part for Xbox/PS3 works with any Windows XP Media Center PC or newer; Vista/7 includes Media Center in all editions.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/05/27/comparing-smartphone-market-share-by-operating-system

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1126812

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS#Competition

That is all.

There you have it: we have Patriot Act, and Chinese do not, so they had to resort to hacking.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jeffrey_mann/2009/12/18/googles-eric-schmidt-needs-media-training-not-a-privacy-spanking/

Q: People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?

A: I think judgement matters If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

If you dare to read the whole thing again, you'll realize it has nothing to do with phones, but everything with smartphone. Nokia is far far away from being number one there, and RIM and Apple are number 1 and 2 respectively.

Very wrong. Neither RIM nor Apple have ever got anywhere near Nokia's market share in smartphones. Currently it's:
Nokia 39.3%
RIM 20.8%
Apple 17.1%

i.e. Nokia has nearly double the market share of it's nearest competitor.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1224645

Just to add a better source with more data: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1126812

If you look at the article you can see that in one years time (2Q 08 - 2Q 09) Apple went from 2.8% to 13.3%, almost a 500% increase. On the other hand, Nokia went down from 47.4% to 45%, a 5% decrease in market share. I am by no means a fan of Apple, but you should really check your info before posting it just makes you look bad. In the long run I really think Android will overtake both of them by sheer number and functionality.

iPhone introduction put the smartphone front and center into the mainstream and turned a business device into a consumer one. Prior to the iPhone's introduction smartphones were used by enterprise and a tiny group of geeks.

Nonsense - Internet enabled phones that could run apps were around, and used by consumers, years before the Iphone appeared. The Iphone had, and still has relatively, small market share - there was no sudden jump. Even in the high end, people are buying far more from companies like Nokia than from Apple.

No, the smartphone really was almost entirely a business device before the iPhone and there was a sudden jump in market share for Apple in the smartphone market. Look at the market share graphs and they tell the story of very fast growth. I suppose you could call that not sudden, but it would be semantics. Nokia still does sell more smartphone according to Gartner's report, but their share is falling, while Apple's is rapidly growing. That's evidence Apple is changing the game, along with most of the other manufacturers copying much of what Apple is doing.

Oh please - "apps" were around long before Apple. Applications and stores already existed. Decent games already existed. Updates existed. "Twoo usability" is a no true scotsman fallacy.

Maybe, app stores existed before but I'd never heard of them, and neither did pretty much anybody else. I don't know if you could buy over the air and run it straight on your phone or not, but the fact that few have heard of them is evidence that they weren't really used and the usability probably wasn't very good. There probably weren't very many apps either. You poo poo the usability change, but the proof is that the web browsers on previous internet enabled phones pretty much didn't get used because they were horrible. Enter the iPhone and there was a huge spike in data usage per device. Since then there have been massive improvements in browsers from other devices such as Palm's and Android's.

smartphone penetration is actually rather large, and probably will be the majority of sales in two years or so.

According to Gartner, 2009 Q3 worldwide mobile phone sales were 309m units (with effectively zero growth over 2008 Q3). Gartner-defined smartphones sold 41m units, representing a 12.8% growth over 2008 Q3. Assuming that total mobile phone sales remain flat in 2010 compared to 2009 (a not-unreasonable assumption given recent historical sales data and market dynamics), then for smartphones to become a "majority of sales" within two years, we will need to see annual growth close to 100% or so. Less if you're brave enough to predict a reduction in the absolute number of mobile phones sold. However, this is still several multiples of the maximum compound growth rates smartphones have ever been able to achieve in their best years (and that was with much smaller installed bases).

It seems as if, from your bullish comments, you're in possession of some very different data than most people, or that you have somehow come to a conclusion very different from what most people perceive as reality. I'm guessing that you disagree with Gartner's most recent 2012 smartphone prediction:

The complete Gartner forecast for smartphone OSes by the end of 2012 puts Symbian on top with 203 million devices sold, and 39% of the market. Android will be second with nearly 76 million units sold, and 14.5% of the market.

Coming in a close third, the iPhone will ship on 71.5 million devices in 2012, giving a 13.7% market share. Windows Mobile will finish fourth, with 66.8 million units sold, or 12.8% of the market.

Very close behind Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS will sell on 65.25 million devices in 2012, Gartner forecasts, making it fifth with 12.5% market share.

Various Linux devices will sell 28 million units, at 5.4% market share, in sixth place. Palm Inc.'s webOS will sell on 11 million units in 2012, about 2.1% of the market, in seventh place, Gartner says.

Android will have moved up the most from 2009 to 2012, from sixth place to second. BlackBerry will have moved down the most, from second to fifth, while iPhone will remain in third position and Windows Mobile will remain in fourth position.

There are two different markets that are often reported (or a subsection of a market really). Mobile phones in general and smartphones particularly. Even the article you linked about the Western Europe market makes this distinction if you had read it. It gives Apple 4% overall but a growth from 16% in 2Q09 to 24% in 3Q09in the smartphone market. That's serious growth in the section of the market that's considered to have the most growth potential by most analysts. There's a lot of upside left that smartphones could do that they don't do yet. But the high growth rate in a high growth market is why Apple gets so much free publicity for the iPhone.

Here's a recent report of overall and smartphone market share. Samsung barely makes the smartphone report, hence it's not that much of a stretch to say they are new to smartphones.

The only numbers I could find so quickly (source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=507466):

Oracle: 47.1%
IBM: 21.1%
MS: 17.4%

everyone else is under 5%. No, it's not a monopoly. But an Oligopoly isn't much better for the market, consumers and (minor) competitors.

Windows (which was never a niche, as another commenter points out)

Sure it was. What's the first version of Windows you bought? If it was 3.0 or later, you're just another mainstream johnny-come-lately. Before that, Microsoft had to literally give it away, by bundling a "run-time" version of it with apps like PageMaker, which were themselves only used by a small segment of the PC-using market. I don't often play the Old-Timer card (because it requires me to point out that I was born during the Johnson administration)*, but I clearly remember when Windows was a niche operating environment, and if you don't... either you're not old enough to know what you're talking about, or... you don't know what you're talking about for other reasons.

(Citation for approaching double-digit share?)

Gartner puts them at 8.8% for 2009Q03, up 8.6% from 2008Q03. IDC puts them at 9.4%. Dell and HP lead Apple comfortably, and Acer/Gateway is still out of its reach, but Apple has lately surpassed Toshiba (and any other PC vendor) in unit sales in the US. If Win7 turns out to be less of a turkey than Vista, and people turn back to PCs with Windows, that could easily deny Apple an actual 10% market share, but the historical delta is on Apple's side: they are approaching 10%.

Either Amiga users can say they're cool and thinking different by not using Windows or a Mac - or I as a Windows user can make joke about the few Mac users and how little it's used compared to Windows.

Actually both are permissible; you're welcome to be as uninformed and in denial or reality as you want to be. It's a free world, after all. :)

*Lyndon, not Andrew

As far as I can tell from here:

http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Blogs/view/5485/.html
http://tinyurl.com/yh3d59w

The "2009" figures are actually from Q1 2009, first published in May:
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912

The original "article" doesn't seem to be the Reg one but a plug for Gartner's October conference:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139026/Android_to_grab_No._2_spot_by_2012_says_Gartner

Gartner's Mystic Megs haven't always been spot-on before. For example, in 2006:
http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_152911_11.html

they seemed to forget to mention the imminent drop of Motorola from number 2 in the list in 2006. They warned about Samsung, who improved their position.

My forecast? In 2012 one of the dominant smartphone OSes will be some Chinese thing that no-one reading this has heard of yet.

As far as I can tell from here:

http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Blogs/view/5485/.html
http://tinyurl.com/yh3d59w

The "2009" figures are actually from Q1 2009, first published in May:
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912

The original "article" doesn't seem to be the Reg one but a plug for Gartner's October conference:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139026/Android_to_grab_No._2_spot_by_2012_says_Gartner

Gartner's Mystic Megs haven't always been spot-on before. For example, in 2006:
http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_152911_11.html

they seemed to forget to mention the imminent drop of Motorola from number 2 in the list in 2006. They warned about Samsung, who improved their position.

My forecast? In 2012 one of the dominant smartphone OSes will be some Chinese thing that no-one reading this has heard of yet.

What IBM needs to do now is make a new version of DB2 that's fully software-compatible with the Oracle API

See here and here for example.

The Oracle compatibility feature will enable Oracle applications to run natively on DB2. In discussions with Gartner, reference customers tell us that DB2 runs 95% or more of Oracle-specific functionality found in SQL statements and natively runs PL/SQL, Oracle's stored procedure language. This is native functionality; it is not an emulator, nor does it require changes to the application code (other than the 5%, which is mostly minor functionality, not found in many applications).

Having said that, and while it is a worthy and very valuable feature, there is more than compatibility in play when trying to pitch a change in DB engine.

they can't upgrade to the newest multi-core processor hardware because Oracle's licensing costs are so expensive.

Not only that, but Oracle applies modifiers according to the processor type. This is in principle not something odd: it makes sense to differentiate per CPU type given the sometimes staggering difference in terms of processing capacity (IBM does the same with the PVU-based pricing). However, given the Oracle acquisition of Sun this could mean that Oracle will tilt the modifiers even more (last time I checked Sun cores had a 0.25 modifier value, the lowest of the lot).

iPhone OS 3.0 has copy/paste. And the implementation is excellent.

Zooming where everything stays in proportion was NOT available on phones before Safari. They'd typically zoom by changing the size of a font, which caused a relayout, and the pictures and text didn;t zoom together. No other browser zoomed had iPhone's zooming method does before iPhone.

Scrolling = scrolling by swipe/drag on iPhone. Scrollling via scroll bars or a 4 way direction pad is inferior.

If I want to download and install an app, I just click, and it just works, unlike the Iphone where phones need to be jailbroken for this to work anywhere. Again, a major UI issue.

There is nowhere else on mobile phones where buying, downloading ad installing an app is a simple click, other than the iPhone App Store. Or at least there wasn;t before Apple did it. And obviously you don't need a jailbroken iPhone to do it.

There are plenty of areas it's been years behind even non-smartphones (3G, Java, video, MMS, copy/paste).

iPhone has all those things but Java. Where iPhone is ahead is in the development environment, allowing far better apps to be written than any other phone platform. Core location, accelerometers, the quality of it's graphics (better than most handheld consoles), and the integrated model for getting apps onto phones.

I'm speaking from experience here, I used to work for Symbian and have done contract development for Nokia in the past. Developing apps for them is a pig compared with the pleasure of developing for the iPhone development platform.

Symbian/Nokia is bleeding badly. They are losing market share. Far from being a niche player Apple is the 3rd biggest manufacturer of smartphones worldwide. Yes Nokia and RIM are bigger, but third does not equal "niche". With the current growth rates Apple will lead before long..
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912

Symbian has about 49% market share and linux another 8%(source).

Symbian is dead? Having 47% of smartphone sales worldwide in Q4 2008 means you're dead? Really?

It's often about the back room business agreements "business partners" then any tech. For example, Hertz Car Rental buys IBM and Cisco because they use Hertz cars almost exclusively. You can't fight this.

I've noticed this too. Though, it might not be politics, per se. It might be corporate bartering, for tax purposes.

But even your example doesn't disprove the general trend. Cisco and IBM both sell OSS.

Garner say 85 percent of companies are already using open source. In this day in age, if you companies is not using OS, they are a dinosaur.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=801412

Words cannot express the sheer cognitive dissonance involved in seeing these types of reports come from Gartner, a firm that has spent most of the last decade fellating Microsoft. Well, English words at least. I suppose the German would be "Schadenfreude".

"The Gartner survey results indicate that OSS in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations."

Well this all depends on how you look at their study. If you take it as "internet viewers" then yes, you are right. There's quite a large number of "internet viewers" who cannot use flash ie G1's, iPhones, ipod touches, Blackberries, smartphones in general. According to http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=688116 there were 32.2 million smartphones sold in 2008. That's quite a number of devices incapable of flash. If you look at their data, they talk about PC's not internet devices; so they may be right. They appear to be misleading in their term "internet viewers"

Well, According to Gartner, The world PC market was 264 million units in 2007 [1]. According to displaysearch, The world netbook market reached 14 million units in 2008.[2]

Granted they're different years, but comparing volumes, netbooks accounted for roughly 5% of the world PC market in 2008. Even if only one of three netbooks sold in 2008 ran Linux, that alone would push market share for Linux by volume on new PCs in 2008 above 0.86%.

As for installed base(Which you may have meant by "market share"), I don't think any company, IDC included, has a reasonable method to determine how many PCs exist in the first place, let alone what OS they run.

Energy is a *very* small part of TCO.

See Gartner's 2008 TCO study.

For the home user, the TCO comes mostly in repair costs should the laptop ever break. If they're buying $399 laptops and using them as disposables, this is less of an issue. Most people are still spending $900 on a laptop, and then get sticker shock when the motherboard dies and Dell wants a $550 replacement board three weeks after the three year warranty expires.

the stats released compare phone sales, not the under lying os. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=827912. how do they arrive at the conclusion when the "other" category shows 7000k units sold vs the iphones 4750k? what os is the other 7000k phones running do you think?

I'm actually pretty sure WinMo isn't the most common smartphone platform - that distinction probably goes to RIM, and if not then S60. But Nokia has a much smaller presence in the US than in Europe and Asia. I'm pretty sure RIM has the most smartphones overall.

Gartner's Q2 2008 worldwide statistics by OS put Symbian first, followed by RIM, followed by Windows Mobile, followed by Linux, followed by Mac OS X^W^W^WiPhone OS.

Synergy Research's first-half 2008 US smartphone figures put RIM at the top (46%), Apple second (15%), Motorola third (presumably for all OSes).

And if you want to look forward, Sarah Palin — McCain's choice for a vice-president — is an avid e-mail user and has even come under criticism, as she found a creative solution to get around the law, with which the lawmakers aim to infringe on their executive's domain.

Seriously? Infringe on their executive's domain? The executive is still answerable to the public, and while there are exceptions for what can be subpoenaed, the executive does not get to decide unilaterally what meets those criteria. Everything is archived, and then there is a process by which the decisions are made based on the arguments of both sides.

McCain's part with regards to technology.

McCain is not a technophobe or a retrograde — his campaign is using technology quite a bit and has posted its share of YouTube videos (a very cheap way to get once message out). It is not as techno-cool as Obama's, but no less so than Hillary Clinton's or Biden's own campaigns were. Indeed, Bill Clinton — everybody's favorite bubble-creator — has sent a whopping two e-mails during his 8 years in office.

What keeps McCain himself from a computer — as has been repeatedly pointed out since Obama's revolting attack — are the injuries sustained in Vietnamese prison, where his torturers were twisting his broken arms (waterboarding is for wussies). The man can't lift his arms above his shoulders to this day — I wonder, why Obama has not ridiculed his inability to comb his hair by himself...

And if you want to look forward, Sarah Palin — McCain's choice for a vice-president — is an avid e-mail user and has even come under criticism, as she found a creative solution to get around the law, with which the lawmakers aim to infringe on their executive's domain. How good, do you think, is Biden with computers?

I know this is a US-centric site but what's more interesting to me is that no one is comparing this to the worldwide market leader, Nokia.

Nokia has more than double the market share of its closest rival, RIM. Gartner smart phone market report

I addressed that a few posts above, but I'll address it more thoroughly now.

From IT Jungle:
"According to sources at IBM, about 1,800 of the patents that were issued to Big Blue in 2005 were for software-related inventions... IBM says that the percentage of its patents relating to software inventions has been increasing steadily in the past few years. It was 51 percent in 2003, 58 percent in 2004, and 61 percent in 2005."

-----

Second, until patent reform takes place, this is the best IBM can do. Offer their patents to others wishing patent reform on software patents while at the same time making sure they are protected

Well, it's true that despite what changes are in store, you've got to play the current game as well as you can.

However, IBM is one of the strongest supporters of software patents, and has consistently been so throughout the history of software patenting.

Here is a transcript of USPTO hearings in 1994 - back when many industry players held Slashdot-like dislike for software patents. Even back then, IBM took a pro-software-patent stance and advocated for their allowance.

(Incidentally, that transcript should be required reading for anyone who wants to participate in this debate - IBM raised some extremely persuasive points that most Slashdotters don't like to acknowledge - such as: "We can't divorce computer program-related inventions from computer hardware and other microprocessor inventions. The overlap between the two is so great that cutting back on one automatically cuts back on the other.")

IBM continues to lobby in favor of software patents - particularly in the EU. From FFII.org:
"In the wake of the Opensource hype, IBM's rhetoric has become relatively moderate, but nonetheless it is supported by real pressure. IBM has acquired approximately 1000 European software patents whose legal status is currently unclear. Given the great number of software patents in IBM's hands, IBM is one of the few software companies who may have a genuine interest in software patentability."

From Ars Technica:
"IBM and OSDL to help Patent Office get organized"
This article is about IBM's contributions to the USPTO to help it improve its search tools, and in developing a Wiki-like system for allowing the public to participate in patent examination. This initiative is hardly about deconstructing the patent system - it's about sharpening and improving it, so that better-examined patents can issue.

And from Gartner:
"IBM Uses Patents to Lead Open-Source Community"
"IBM announced that it would open access to technology covered by 500 IBM software patents to any individual, community or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open-source software (see www.opensource.org). IBM also proposed an industrywide "patent commons" for sharing patents among technology developers."

Note: This is not "donating patents to the public domain" or "abandoning patents." This is "using patents strategically to promote a particular sector of the market," i.e., the OSI crew.

In short - you couldn't be more wrong in your summary of IBM's position on software patents. IBM is a HUGE player in this space. They know how to get them, and they know how to use them well. They have consistently supported software patenting, from its mainstream inception in the 1990's and through today, and consistently lobby for expansion in terms of allowability, regional acceptance, and enforcement power.

- David Stein

Can be found here. As you can see: nothing to see here, move along.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=681107 "Gartner Identifies Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008 to 2012"

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=530109 for the real thing

+5, Insightful, eh?

Funny Mac people. Mmm, kool-aid. This RDF is kinda trippy.

Real numbers. It's not really even worth looking up. You can call it 4%. You can call it 8%. I don't really care either way. Single digits. While HP and Dell fight it out for number 1 spot in the mid 20 percents.

It was 4% a few years ago. Everyone knows that, such as the GP. Not surprising it has gone up 50% (err, 2% in absolute terms) as OS X and iPods have been introduced. Note those numbers are just for the US. Apple doesn't fare nearly as well in the rest of the world. As in, insignificant. Negligible.

The thing with Apple is that they tend to give you everything you might need up front, rather than keeping costs low and letting you upgrade to the things you need. Sure, if you start with the Mac pro as your base and bring up other systems to match, the Mac pro may be less expensive, but I'd probably have everything I needed on a PC well before its specs rivaled that of a Mac pro.

As far as your argument on an sibling post about poor drivers and companies going under: if you buy the cheapest cards on the market this might be a concern, but you can buy expansion cards from reputable companies. Many OEMs (Dell, Hp, etc.) offer various expansion cards. I would expect their expansion cards work well with the systems they build, and these companies have five times as many sales as apple, so I don't see them going under any time soon.

According to Gartner's latest numbers, Apple had 6.6% of USA sales in Q1 2008, up from 5.2% in Q1 2007. IDC says Apple has 6% USA market share, up from 4.9%.

Apple's worldwide market share wasn't listed because they weren't in the top 5, but it's less than 4.4% (Toshiba's worldwide share).

Michael Silver, it should be noted, is fairly neutral in his coverage of Microsoft. Here is a link to his past papers:

http://www.gartner.com/Search?op=16&f=2&keywords=&bop=0&op=16&sort=73&archived=0&simple1=0&n=8332&authorId=8332&resultsPerSearch=0&dir=70&sort=73&dir=70

The problem, as I see it, is not Vista itself. Rather, it is the slow but steady migration from PCs being central to computing tasks to reliance on servers for processing power and storage. Although Outlook client may run on your PC, the real work managing your company's mail is handled in the backrooms on server hardware. They aren't running client Windows back there.

So on the front end, as McNealy and Ellison have been saying for a decade, computers require less and less individual computing power, and backend servers need more and more. This is the problem for Windows because the growing requirements of the OS to do all the cool things that users like is outstripping the pace at which the needs of the users are growing. Translation: Vista does too much unnecessary stuff (however cool and flashy it might be.)

Apple does this too, but their hardware requirements are automatically met by virtue of them selling the hardware themselves. Linux, OTOH, is both a low-end client and a high-end server. It fills the roles needed by users without bringing with it a hefty cost per unit.

The upshot is that the PC as a computing platform is ailing. It will always have its place, and it will hang on for quite a while longer. However, the general trend towards less necessary functionality on the client end and more stability and power on the server side means that alternative systems now have a lower hurdle to gain a foothold in the upcoming paradigm shift.

We have already seen a huge shift away from laptops as the mobile computer towards dedicated devices like the Blackberry and smartphone. As we progress, many of the roles that the PC plays now will move closer to the user so that the usage scenario no longer is sitting in front of a glowing monitor but rather sitting back and doing the same job faster and more easily than currently performed. I, for one, welcome our new embedded overlords.

The linked blog article is okay if you want a summary, but if you'd prefer, you can check out the complete document. Here's a PDF link to Gartner's full analysis: The State of Open Source 2008.

I have to conclude that the article's author, Paul McDougall, must be a moron and/or a troll. McDougall's math:

• Vista shipped on 39% of PCs in 2007: (floor of Bill Gates's "more than 100 million copies" boast for 11¼ months) divided by (nine-month-old estimate of the last 12 months of PC shipments)
• XP shipped on 67% of PCs in 2002: (14 months of XP sales) divided by (12 months of PC shipments)

We like the cut of your jib!
We have a job for you at careers@"

Here's a better link http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.8795.s.8.jsp

Sales of the iPhone are are currently around 1.35 million units. To put that in perspective, in 2007 about 1.13 BILLION handsets will be sold worldwide. So Apple's market share could be generously estimated at about 0.2%--they just aren't a real player in the phone market.

Apple shouldn't be concerned about the Google phone. They should be concerned about what will happen in a year or so when the media hype has worn off and there are a dozen viable (and more functional) iPhone equivalents.

This "non-savvy mom" happens to be a vice-president at Gartner. So it matters not only because her daughter is a target market, but because she is a VP of a big company that tells lots of other big companies what operating system to buy. And as for her savviness, she does have a lot of "director of marketing" on her CV lately, which is not necessarily a good sign, but she does have an engineering degree so at least she used to be one of the good guys...

The "mother" was Yvonne Genovese, Research VP of Gartner Research. She was on stage with a discussion panel.

Steve Ballmer's Interview

Ah, see 3% with a grain of salt. 3% DOA would be ridiculous, I agree, but 3% failing within a year? Or 3% failing after 2,880 hours of use (4 whole months of play time)? It's hard to say.

Then you've got to count all the possible failures. Harddrive failure rates are around 2-4% according to some surveys, so that could account for the whole thing by itself (even though it doesn't). Laptops, as a more mobile platform, are between 15 and 20% likely to crap out on a yearly basis, according to a Gartner press release from last year...Same release put desktop failure rates at around 5% in the first year. Compared to those rates 3% looks godlike.

But there's just not enough data.

...that OS/2 would be the dominant operating system by, IIRC, 1993 or thereabouts.

I just did some Googling on things like "bad Gartner predictions" and "missed Gartner predictions" or '"Gartner predictions" scorecard' hoping that someone had tried to keep tabs on them, but found to my disappointment virtually no relevant hits. Everyone discusses them in the months after they're released, nobody seems to check back even as recently as a year.

Of course, with predictions like these for 2002... "During 2002, leading-edge businesses will exploit application integration to generate business innovation...." how the heck would anyone ever figure out whether or not it was fulfilled?

I can't believe people pay Gartner for this stuff.

People should not read too much into this. To quote Gartner,

"On 17 January 2007, Microsoft published a bulletin outlining downgrade rights for Windows Vista
original equipment manufacturer (OEM) editions (see the Downgrade Rights Chart at
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/volbr ief.mspx). Users buying PCs preloaded with
OEM versions of Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate may downgrade their PCs
to Windows XP Professional only."

Check out the full Gartner report here: http://www.gartner.com/resources/145900/145950/vis ta_oem_downgrade_rights_w_145950.pdf

This should suffice for 90% of the downgrade requests. Any more esoteric reasons can probably be handled on a case by case basis with Microsoft's Customer Support. The only big change with downgrade rights is that Vista will not allow you to downgrade to anything below XP, i.e Windows 2000.

DB2 isn't competitive to Oracle? Gartner DataQuest's 2005 numbers show otherwise: http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_152619 _11.html/. IBM is @ 22% to Oracle's 48%. Who knows what those numbers look like now, but IBM certainly hasn't been trounced.

Everything is looked at through the lens of the Dollar. As management listens to whatever research and advisory firms already output, let's see what Gartner, as an example, has to say on the subject.

Processor.com, July 2, 2004:
As vice president for research firm Gartner, the world's largest IT research group, he's studied the question at length and learned that just because a new technology makes something possible, it does not, sadly, make that very thing probable... "I can point to clear examples where call centers are highly virtualized," says Raskino, "with agents working almost entirely from their homes." But when he speaks to other managers about how virtual technologies are being used, they look at him in utter disbelief. "They say, 'Can it be possible? I'm sure our unions won't accept it.' The forces of inertia get in the way. They don't stop the change, of course. They just slow it down."
Gartner.com, 30 Oct 2001:
In his October 30 address at Symposium/ITxpo 2001 in Brisbane. Gartner vice president and research director Simon Hayward... enjoyed poking fun at today's cubicle environment, using the cartoon character Dilbert to help him out. "It's not just the workers who are objecting to the cubicle culture," he told his audience. "Managers also recognize that people will be more effective if the environment is better adapted to the reality of work."
CFO.com, October 01, 2006: Another factor pushing companies to reconsider office space is the widening gap between what workers need and what workplaces provide. At one time, office employees labored primarily in solitude; today, they spend two-thirds of their time collaborating, according to Gartner. But offices are still set up for the old style of work. "In most companies, you find that conference rooms are overbooked while offices and cubicles are empty," says Mark Golan, Cisco's vice president of worldwide real estate and the chairman of CoreNet. "It's insane. Not only is it wasteful, it doesn't suit the needs of your workforce."
Even if you can build the case against cubicles, you still need to be able to communicate with management. That means, y'know, diplomacy, communication skills, a lil bit of cunning, and what not.

Nevertheless, you might be heard, but don't expect them to listen.
Of course, if they've already invested in cubicles, tough luck. Nothing's gonna change their minds. Cubicles might be less productive than other office layouts, but dumping an existing design == dumping money. Bad ROI.

As for Aeron chairs? Why not demand an onsite spa and inhouse office-desk pizza delivery while you're at it?