Gartner is lowering its IT industry forecast.
Hit by the economic downturn and fluctuating exchange rates, worldwide IT spending is expected to drop 6 percent this year, according to a new Gartner report… Spending will likely settle in at $3.2 trillion for 2009, compared with $3.4 trillion in 2008. Last year, IT spending had actually surged by 6.2 percent over 2007… Due to the ongoing recession, the projected 6 percent spending decline is greater than Gartner’s original forecast of a 3.8 percent drop, which the firm made in March… Hardware spending will see the sharpest drop at 16.3 percent, while software spending will ease down only 1.6 percent…
Often, soon-to-be-outmoded technologies experience a final wave of innovation as radical improvements that were always seen to cannibalise existing product are given a chance. This is happening right now in lightbulbs, where incandescents are fated to give way to LED, OLED and other solid state light emmitters. The NYT carries an industry press release as “news”.
There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades…
Kedrosky points out that online advertising is now pricier per eyeball than TV.
Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers…
In yet another example of a new entrant taking advantage of incumbent’s unwillingness to cannibalise profitable legacy products, Acer is close to passing up Dell and challenging HP/Compaq for PC industry dominance.
Last year, Acer’s market share grew by 3 percentage points, to 10.9 percent, while Dell gained just 0.1 percentage point, to 15 percent, according to the research company IDC. Acer has continued to narrow that gap this year, claiming 11.6 percent of the market to Dell’s 13.6 percent through the first quarter… Acer already ranks as the second-largest PC seller in Europe, behind H.P… Be it wireless technology or super-thin laptops with a long battery life, Acer often ships computers with new features before any other large PC maker. And when it spots a hot trend… netbooks, for instance… Acer follows in force, bombarding the market with low-cost products… H.P.’s revenue from the PC business has declined 19 percent in each of the last two quarters. Dell’s decline has been even more severe, with desktop sales falling about 30 percent each quarter. Acer’s overall revenue has fallen as well, but only 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Using crowd-sourcing, Netflix has announced that a team has won the $1 million prize awarded for improving its movie recommendation engine by 10% or more. The winning team was formed from several interim prize winners over the past years.
Netflix said that other contestants now have 30 days to try to do even better. If they cannot, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos will collect the $1 million.
China is serious about controlling the network access of desktops there. “Many people say” reporting from the NYT. It looks like US trade groups see this as an effort to wrest control of the PC market away from US suppliers. I’m sure Lenovo is on board though.
On May 19, the ministry issued a directive to computer makers that required the preinstallation of Green Dam on hard drives or a CD-ROM with installation software that usually is packaged with computers. The directive also requires that Green Dam be saved in backup files. The directive makes clear that the government intends to ensure universal use of Green Dam on new computers in China.
China will postpone:
China has indefinitely delayed enforcement of a requirement that PC makers preinstall Green Dam-Youth Escort software that experts believe would have screened not just Internet pornography but also some online political content… Experts have warned that the Green Dam software poses security risks, and last week, the U.S. Trade Representative protested that Green Dam violates World Trade Organization rules…
Web 2.0 site Scribd.com – the “YouTube of documents” – will sell books in digital format, putting pressure on Amazon’s Kindle.
Scribd is offering publishers considerably more control over how their digital titles are sold. Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition… Scribd will allow publishers to see what is selling and change their prices accordingly… Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue… The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites… letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework and recipes. About 60 million users a month read documents on the site, embed them in blogs and share links to texts over social networks and e-mail messages.