Gartner's Predictions for 2005, and Beyond

Gartner is the leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry. The Company focuses on delivering objective, in-depth analysis and actionable advice to enable clients to make more informed business and technology decisions.

Recent technology research has enabled Gartner to develop a series of predictions for the IT industry over the next decade. The predictions presented here represent some of the major disruptions and opportunities Gartner foresees in IT during the next decade.

Prediction: Microcommerce opportunities for new products and services less than $5 will generate $30 billion in revenue per year by 2010
The major trends driving microcommerce are:

• Widespread access to physical and social network infrastructures, providing a marketplace for buyers and sellers to locate each other.
  
• Low-cost models for completing transactions (such as micropayment infrastructures and low-cost delivery).
  
• Automatic location identification for targeted content and services.

Examples:

• Apple Computer's iTunes music store has been very successful. Conceived as a driver for iPod sales, it is becoming a revenue driver for the company.
  
• In the mobile application domain, users spent approximately 570 million euros on ring tones, logos and screen savers.
  
• In the business-to-business space, online advertisement grew significantly, evidenced by Amazon's referral program with more than 50,000 partners and Google's AdSense service.
  
• The Zingo taxi-hailing service in London uses location tracking and payment through mobile phones.

Prediction: By 2015, collective intelligence breakthroughs will drive a 10 percent productivity increase.
Collective intelligence is a collective (rather than hierarchical) approach to making decisions. Knowledge workers choose to allocate their time and resources to tasks where their skills can best be used, based on corporate needs. This more-efficient use of resources can increase the quantity and quality of work output. New technologies driving collective decision making:

• Wikis - simple text-based collaborative systems for managing hyperlinked collections of Web pages that enable users to change pages or comments created by other users.
  
• The open-source movement - a cooperative group of contributors with no single central authority.
  
• Prediction markets work on the principle that the aggregation of information from members of a broad network enables better decision making for less money and in less time as the market pulls together strands of information on an issue.

Prediction: Cyberattacks against software flaws will double in speed by 2006
Attacks against enterprises take advantage of missing patches and misconfigured systems. Until 2006, attacks that occur within 10 to 20 days of an announcement of a software flaw requiring a patch will increase as attackers become more efficient at "reverse-engineering" patches. Day-zero attacks (attacks that occur before a patch is issued) will remain rare. By 2006, attacks against misconfigured software will decrease because Microsoft and other vendors will ship software with more-secure default configurations.

Prediction: By 2007, three of the top 10 PC vendors will exit the market
At least three lean years are expected for the global PC market after 2005. In these years, unit growth will fall below the double-digit rates the market is accustomed to, and revenue growth will come to a standstill. Price competition will intensify as vendors struggle to maintain growth in an austere market environment characterized by weak replacement activity and the growing importance of emerging markets. All this will further squeeze PC margins.

Prediction: By 2008, the technological differences between PCs, mobile devices, e-books, TVs and cellular phones will be eradicated
The confluence of:

• Electronic displays rivaling the readability attributes of paper
  
• Secure broadband wireless available in virtually every device at extremely low prices
  
• Extraordinarily inexpensive mass storage
  
• Always-connected, low-power-consumption electronics
  will result in the core technologies between TVs, radios, PCs and mobile devices by 2008 being essentially identical.

Different forms of the devices will be optimized for various uses (primarily voice, primarily text, primarily video and more) and different business models used for providing the content, but it is clear that what we now use for separate functions will only be a user interface difference. The inner works will be identical, other than the display drivers and a few ancillary components.

View the full report at www.gartner.com, where you can read about the market implications Gartner foresees as a result of these changes.

These predictions have been reproduced by kind permission of Gartner.