Here is aftermath for my computer technology trends and predictions for year 2014. Let’s see how correctly they went. Original assumptations are in in italic font style.
It seems that PC market is not recovering in 2014. IDC is forecasting that the technology channel will buy in around 34 million fewer PCs this year than last. It seem that things aren’t going to improve any time soon (down, down, down until 2017?)
PC business was going down down… but the speed of going down seemed to be slowing towars the the end of 2014. Worldwide PC shipments reached 79.4 million units in Q3, down only 0.5% year-on-year. When the year 2014 was nearing to end, the PC market was doing better than estimated. For example Intel reported Better-Than-Expected Q3 Revenue and Microsoft reported fiscal first-quarter profit and sales that exceeded analysts’ estimates, thanks to recovering personal-computer sales and demand for Internet-based cloud software and services. It seems that PC marker in the end performed somewhat better than I expected. Positive results in Western Europe and North America can be a sign of gradual recovery for the PC industry.
The Q3 PC numbers were better than expected, but not great. According to market research firms Gartner and IDC worldwide PC shipments fell 0.5% and 1.7%, respectively. The top five personal computer makers got bigger in the third quarter at the expense of smaller PC makers, which are losing share in a consolidating market. The top five vendors shipped more than 52 million PCs in Q3 and accounted for two-thirds of the market, and their PC shipments rose 9% year over year last quarter. Some smaller vendors have already scaled back or have withdrawn from the PC business: Sony, Samsung and Toshiba. Recent numbers show Apple’s Mac as a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak PC industry.
It seems that PC sales are expected to recover in 2o15, but you need to accept the fact that Mobile Now Exceeds PC: The Biggest Shift Since the Internet Began. All ICT devices – PCs, tablets, ultra portables and smartphones – sold this year to 2.4 billion devices. Smart phones which accounted for 71 per cent. Tablet share is 9.5 per cent.
We are in post-PC era where smart phones and tablets are the “hot” devices and PCs seem to be old-fashioned. The last PC replacement cycle is about to start turning – When even senior sysadmins work on an iPhone connected to an Apple TV, the end is nigh. Intel will combine its PC and mobile processor divisions under one roof, reflecting a changing market in which the line between tablets and laptops has blurred. It seems that mobile growth has it’s limists as iPad Sees First-Ever Decline As Wider Tablet Shipment Growth Drops 7.2% In 2014 To 235.7M Units.
According to Marc Andreessen ALL Of The Biggest, Oldest Tech Companies Will Be Forced To Break Up in coming years. The IT industry restructuring era has already started: Dell has gone private HP and Symantec are each splitting in two, IBM has sold off its PC server and semi-conductor operations, Tibco and Compuware have been the subject of private equity takeouts, Activist investors gave their hooks into EMC, Juniper, NetApp and others
When the PC business is slowly decreasing, smartphone and table business will increase quickly. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs.
Happened as expected. Mobile Now Exceeds PC: The Biggest Shift Since the Internet Began
The only PC sector that seems to have some growth is server side. Microservers & Cloud Computing to Drive Server Growth article says that increased demand for cloud computing and high-density microserver systems has brought the server market back from a state of decline. We’re seeing fairly significant change in the server market. According to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report, server unit shipment growth will increase in the next several years, thanks to purchases of new, cheaper microservers. The total server IC market is projected to rise by 3% in 2014 to $14.4 billion: multicore MPU segment for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid state drives are expected to see better numbers.
The was some server growth seen. For example In the second quarter of 2014, worldwide server shipments grew 1.3 percent year-over-year, while revenue moved upward 2.8 percent from the second quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, Inc. x86 servers managed to produce an increase of 1.4 percent in units in the second quarter of 2014, and an 8.1 percent increase in revenue. IDC estimates that worldwide server revenue increased 2.5% year over year to $12.6 billion in the second quarter. Demand for servers in the public cloud continues to be a major driving force for server market growth. HP has held the number one server market share position for four quarters. In the June quarter HP generated $3.2 billion in revenue for a 25.4% share and 4% revenue growth. Otherwise top 5 companies were driving the server market.
Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future’s flash, cache and cloud article tells that the flash is the tier for primary data; the stuff christened tier 0. Data that needs to be written out to a slower response store goes across a local network link to a cloud storage gateway and that holds the tier 1 nearline data in its cache. Never mind software-defined HYPE, 2014 will be the year of storage FRANKENPLIANCES article tells that more hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins.
Lots of software defined hype was in media. It is hard to filter out how much real results were gained on this field during 2o14. In IT, beware of fad versus functional. There were very many software storage companies making progress and slower operating traditional storage companies. Structural changes in IT and storage technology are green lighting opportunities for Cisco as it has no legacy storage products holding it back and server-led storage opportunities are growing and growing.
Race to UBER-CHEAP STORAGE is OVER. Kryder’s Law says disk storage will keep on getting cheaper. But it is increasingly looking like it won’t, which has baleful implications for cloud storage and archiving. Like Moore’s Law, Kryder’s Law is (a) not a law, merely a wonderfully apt observation for a prolonged but not eternal period of time, and (b) borne of an incredibly bold and confident view of technology. The “Law” declares that disk drive areal density would more than double every two years, meaning disk drive capacity would do likewise. After more than a quarter century of Kryder’s Law, the exponential increase in disk capacity at constant form factor, and thus exponential decrease in $/GB, almost everyone believed that long-term storage was effectively free. The assumption was that: “If you could afford to store some data for a few years, you could afford to store it forever. The cost of that much storage would have become negligible.” Only that is no longer true. Recent data shows that disk is now about seven times as expensive as it would have been had the industry maintained its pre-2010 Kryder rate. Each step change increase in capacity will take longer, be relatively more expensive, and disks will have to be engineered for longer life, meaning lengthier warranty period
Let’s turn to the cloud and the Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud storage cost reductions. The three are in a race to the bottom, a race to zero, so to speak, as they try to wipe out other cloud storage competitors and persuade corporates to store their data in their clouds. It won’t be free and it won’t be infinite. The Kryder rate slowdown will see to that and business models based on a continuation of the Kryder at at pre-Thai flood levels will fail as their costs become untenable.
IT managers are increasingly replacing servers with SaaS article says that cloud providers take on a bigger share of the servers as overall market starts declining. An in-house system is no longer the default for many companies. IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers.
Demand for servers in the public cloud continues to be a major driving force for server market growth.Virtualization has Surpassed 50 percent of all Server Workloads. Worldwide IT spending creeps to 2.1 % in 2014 as virtualization bites. I don’t have data on what percentage of servers was going to the cloud companies.
The biggest story in cloud computing this past year has been the adoption of container technology over virtual machines. Containers have gone from an experimental Linux technology, to front and center in the battle for cloud computing supremacy. Google, Amazon, IBM, and Rackspace have all announced their container strategies following the lead of container startups Docker and CoreOS.
I hope that the IT business will start to grow this year as predicted.
There was at least some hope for growth. But there was quite much difference on between different countries how good the situation looks. Worldwide IT spending creeps to 2.1 % in 2014 as virtualization bites.
IDC predicts that IT consumption will increase next year to 5 per cent worldwide to $ 2.14 trillion. It is expected that the biggest opportunity will lie in the digital space: social, mobility, cloud and analytics. The gradual recovery of the economy in Europe will restore faith in business. Companies are re-imaging their business, keeping in mind changing digital trends.
Digital business was hot hype word. The word consultants were sending out was that you need to digitilize your business or prepare to start loosing in the competition.
In early 2014, the landscape in which businesses operate changed forever when Internet usage on mobile devices exceeded PC usage. It has taken considerable time for businesses and brands to embrace the potential of the Internet. Today, most recognize the Internet as a vital foundation for everything from operations to marketing and sales to logistics, CRM, and customer service. Still, many businesses and brands struggle to truly leverage the digital landscape to meet the expectations of their customers. Many more will struggle with the migration of audiences (customers) to mobile. Mobile devices are becoming important gateways to business data and applications. Cloud back-ends – often implemented as rich API service points – are fast becoming the back-end complement to this new wave of applications.
Suddenly ‘Big Data’ has exploded onto the technology scene with new applications, new products, new terminology, and lots of hype.This is connected to increased use of Internet of Things (IoT). Investors have poured over $2 billion into businesses built on Hadoop.
The death of Windows XP will be on the new many times on the spring. There will be companies try to cash in with death of Windows XP: Microsoft’s plan for Windows XP support to end next spring, has received IT services providers as well as competitors to invest in their own services marketing.
XP was announced dead. Some big organizations had to get linger support contracts. Companies were mainly updating from Windows XP to Windows 7 (Windows 8 was not much wanted by companies)
There will be talk on what will be coming from Microsoft next year. Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a series of updates in 2015 that could see major revisions for the Windows, Xbox, and Windows RT platforms.
New Microsoft boss – focus to cloud and mobile. It was revealed that the next Windows after 8.1 will be named Windows 10. Cheap Windows 8.1 tablets came to market in the end of 2014. Microsoft started to embrace open source and support other operating systems (iOS and Android) on their services.
The number of PC running Windows 8.1 nudged past Windows XP for the first time in November. Windows 8.1 broke the global 10 per cent market-share barrier a year after general release, and has now hit 19.95 per cent. Windows 7 remains the dominant PC operating system at 50.34 per cent.
Microsoft stopped selling consumer versions of Windows 7 to computer makers – This means you’ll only be able to buy a computer running Windows 7 as long as stock lasts (Windows 7 Professional will continue being sold for business users).
‘Open source’ and ‘Microsoft’ used to be like oil and water; the two would never be mixed. But today, Microsoft has shown that it is highly supportive of this community by open sourcing parts of its key products and allowing these platforms to run on its Azure infrastructure. Microsoft announced that they would be open sourcing .NET and allowing it to run on OS X and Linux as well. Microsoft is considering open sourcing parts of Bing backend tech. There’s no doubt that, at least in some respects, Microsoft wants to make a big show of being more open and supportive of interoperability. What Will Microsoft’s “Embrace” of Open Source Actually Achieve? Is Microsoft Truly Embracing Open Source?
According to Linux Foundation the new Microsoft we are seeing today is certainly a different organization when it comes to open source. Microsoft has stopped hating Linux. Microsoft’s general manager Satya Nadellan of the Azure supports the now five different Linux distribution. Today, about 20 percent of the Azure cloud of virtual machines are Linux-based systems. By the way Microsoft also gets royalties from very many Android manufacturers (and Android is based on Linux).
Also Microsoft makes Visual Studio free for small teams: full-featured version of Visual Studio 2013 that will be available at no cost to independent developers, students, small companies and others not making enterprise applications. And the company is releasing a preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 with new features for building applications that run on platforms including Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Amateur programmers are becoming increasingly more prevalent in the IT landscape. A new IDC study has found that of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million (roughly 40 percent) are “hobbyist developers,” which is what IDC calls people who write code even though it is not their primary occupation. The boom in hobbyist programmers should cheer computer literacy advocates.IDC estimates there are almost 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world as we enter 2014, including 11 million professional developers.
Open source developed by by amateur programmers coming more and more important.
In November 2014, the top six supercomputers all run Linux, but that’s about the only thing they have in common. Android is Linux based and rules smart phone market – also big in wearable and IoT. Debate Over Systemd Exposes the Two Factions Tugging At Modern-day Linux
HTML5 is Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile. Web technologies are already everywhere, even in native mobile apps, and that it’s only a matter of time before they catch up to “all the capabilities of a native, proprietary platform.” Just look under the hood.
The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability will be more and more talked. Interfacing between languages will be increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. The trend toward increased complexity in software shows no sign of abating, and modern hardware creates new challenges. Now, mobile phones are starting to appear with eight cores with the same ISA (instruction set architecture) but different speeds, some other streaming processors optimized for different workloads (DSPs, GPUs), and other specialized cores.
The complexity was growing. The practice of using co-processors type technology for certain task became more widely used. Using GPU for computation is no longer esoteric special technology, it is mainsream. Some are even trying to go beyond GPU, and use FPGA for accelleration. For example Intel unveiled new Xeon chip with integrated FPGA. FPGAs can give 10X, 20X, or 30X performance improvements.
The traditional programming languages stayed pretty much as popular as they were on previous year. Programming Languages popular web search engine queries on the basis of measuring the TIOBE has declared javascript in recent years as the programming language. It grew most. In Tiobe index C is still number one.
Just another new USB connector type will be pushed to market. Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen ‘type C’ jacks will be reversible article tells that USB is to get a new, smaller connector that, like Apple’s proprietary Lightning jack, will be reversible. Designed to support both USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, the new connector, dubbed “Type C”, will be the same size as an existing micro USB 2.0 plug.
The new USB connector “Type C” was releases, it supported features beyond traditional USB only. It will come with reversible ends, featuring the same small connector on either end. But it means so much more for new smartphones, tablets and even laptops. The new USB Type C will mean faster charging, quicker data transfer rates and thanks to the smaller connectors, smaller phones can be made too. The Type-C plug is compatible with the USB 3.1 standard meaning super fast data transfer rates. The big sell for most users is going to be faster charging. USB Type C can deliver power at up to 100 watts at 20 volts.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Global PC market’s not dead, it’s just resting – Gartner
Rival beancounter IDC not so sure
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/q4_global_pc_market/
The PC market never really died, it was just resting – at least according to our man at Gartner, who leaned on the latest global sales data to prove there’s some life left yet in the form factor.
According to preliminary stats, sales into channels grew one per cent in Q4 to 83.7 million boxes as retailers and disties took delivery of more stock in anticipation of a mini return to consumer spending.
More Reading
HP boss Meg Whitman shuffles exec pawns just before biz splitsIt’s a TAB-tastrophe – 83 million fewer units to ship in 2014Toshiba: We’ll STAY in PCs! We’ll just axe a few bodsSamsung abandons Chromebooks, laptops, PCs in EuropeSony set to axe 5,000 workers worldwide as it flings PC biz overboard
Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said the impact of tablets is “lessoning” amid high levels of penetration.
“The PC market never died,” he told us, “but it shrank to a smaller size of users that are perhaps more engaged”.
The US market led the PC shipment recovery, with sales up 13.1 per cent to 18.1 million units, units were up in EMEA by 2.8 per cent to 26.5m and two per cent in Asia Pacific to 26.6m.
Lenovo maintained its lead at the top, with sales up 7.5 per cent to 16.28 million PCs, taking market share to 19.4 per cent. But it was challenged in Q4 by HP’s growth of 16 per cent and market share of 18.8 per cent. For the year, Lenovo extended its lead at the top.
The exit of the Sony and Samsung brands from the PC market benefited the major players, Gartner said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Grew 1 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2014
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2960125
Lenovo Solidifies Top Spot in 2014 Rankings; HP Narrows the Gap with Strong Fourth Quarter
Tomi Engdahl says:
C’mon, Brocade: QLogic’s left the Fibre Channel game. Flat revenues again?
Plus: Is storage firm REALLY shopping itself…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/25/peg_levelling_at_brocade/
Brocade is a member of the flat revenue Earth society, with its mix of annual and quarterly Fibre Channel and Ethernet revenues hardly changing between last year and this year.
Brocade’s fourth fiscal 2014 quarter revenues of $564m were up by one per cent year-on-year, up from $559m a year ago, and also up three per cent sequentially.
Q4 2014 SAN product revenue was $325m, flat year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter.
He says Brocade is positioned well for the “new IP”: one that is “optimised for the unique requirements of the cloud, social, mobile, and Big Data.” Sounds pretty much like last year’s IP – but this one is “open software-driven, agile, and [has] secure networking architectures.”
New software-defined networking apps will be delivered next year.
That’s a big ask for Brocade as a software-defined network, when using commodity hardware, doesn’t command proprietary gear margins.
Meanwhile, Ader’s conclusion is that “the growth outlook for Fibre Channel is challenged and that the IP side of the business faces stiff competition.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bubble-licious: Good times here again for UK tech startups – research
VCs pumping in that money like it’s 2001
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/24/tech_startups_investors_easily_funded_bubble_research/
The level of venture capitalist (VC) investment being pumped into UK and Irish tech companies is now “reminiscent” of the early 2000s, with funding for the third quarter of 2014 double that of a year ago, according to research.
Overall investment for the whole of 2014 is expected to be up 70 per cent to £1.6bn across 350 companies, compared with 2013.
“These levels of growth are reminiscent of the 1999/2000 period,” said chief executive Stuart McKnight. “But we are some way off the peak in November 2000 when 67 deals were completed in one month,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why IT Went Hybrid (And Why It Matters)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2014/01/14/why-it-went-hybrid/
Talk of hybrid IT is all the rage. Gartner predicts that “Nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017,” while James Staten at Forrester writes, “Too late, you are already hybrid.”
The details depend on the fine print of the forecast, and how broadly you think about “IT” or “cloud.” But whatever the specifics, there’s broad agreement that IT departments are becoming more hybrid. That is to say, they source their infrastructure and applications from more and more different places, in more and more different forms.
Parts of IT have long been outsourced in one form or another—through service bureaus, co-location facilities, managed service providers, or other types of external agencies.
Today’s moves to a hybrid model started out being driven by the consumer Internet, and by startups taking a “public-cloud first” approach. The result is that many new applications are widely being delivered in the form of Software-as-a-Service—this is especially true for those tasks that are common across companies, such as collaboration, email, and customer relationship management.
At the same time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered a model whereby pay-as-you-go computing was only a credit-card away.
The reality is that the vast bulk of organizations will be hybrid—not just private nor just public. The implications of increasingly hybrid IT fall into two main areas: technological and organizational
The challenge of hybrid is to avoid creating isolated islands that can’t communicate or exchange data. My advice is to maximize the portability of applications and data among different providers and between on-premise infrastructure and off-premise providers.
While larger organizations will doubtless continue to have some specialized IT roles, more and more IT managers will need to become generalists. They’ll have to adapt to broader roles that reflect less focus on narrow technology stovepipes—like storage, networking, or virtualization.
“We need to be innovation leaders for the organization, offering new capabilities and showing how technology can be deployed to further business advantage.”
The Bottom Line
Something needs to change. And hybrid is an important part of that answer.
Chris Riccam says:
Tomi, first let me say I greatly enjoyed your predictions and appreciate your going back to re-visit them!
However, the most glaringly non-realized prediction you made is the one you didn’t comment on, namely “Spinning rust and tape are DEAD.” I suspect you didn’t address this one because almost everyone is still scratching their heads wondering WHY it’s not happening.
By now you probably know (as many counter-hype-cycle experts have been trying to tell us since early 2000′s) that Flash can never (ever, ever) replace spinning disk. Chris Mellor at The Register just recently figured this out…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/no_flash_datacentre_takeover/
The fundamentally broken economic argument that fostered the very silly notion that Flash would someday replace disk gets more broken every year, as each increase in NAND density brings a resultant decrease in performance.
I’d be interested to hear your take…
Tomi Engdahl says:
You are right that I forgot to “Spinning rust and tape are DEAD.”
When I made the predictions I was in illusion that things on this field would change quickly.
I more start to understand your point: “silly notion that Flash would someday replace disk”
There are fields where flash is very much replacing hard disks, but there are many applications where there is place for magneti storage: you can’t beat the storage price.
Other point favoring the hard disk is that there will be for long time be pretty limited capacity to manufacture flash chips – meaning you can’t soon manufacture enough flash to replace all the hard disks even if higher price per bit would not be a problem.
That’s my take.