Robert Pogson

IDC has a forecast of PC production for the next few years.

Highlights:

• flat or downward trend for 2009.
• recovery in the world excluding USA in 2010
• recovery in USA in 2011
• significant pop as commercial equipment renewal kicks in

This gives FLOSS another year to take advantage of M$’s weakness. If, after 2010 many are going to bite the bullet and invest in new PCs of all kinds, what OS are they going to choose? The one that costs more to maintain fighting malware/DRM/bloat or the lean/mean computing system GNU/Linux? We know from the KACE survey that many have looked at FLOSS. Two more years of looking should be useful. Thin clients are hardly slowing. Netbooks are hardly slowing. Both should be seen as viable technology by the time of recovery and GNU/Linux works well with them.

Two more years of Moore’s Law will give us thin clients well under $100 and shares of servers that will run a user for $10 or so. Retailers are madly trying to sell larger monitors, fancier mice and more powerful video cards, but enough is enough. We can do what we need with today’s technology and someone will supply it even if the Wintel monopoly keeps wanting us to upgrade in an ever more uselessly tight spiral. Something has to give. It is monopoly. This is the end of it.

In the downturn all the little guys of IT will struggle to find a niche which has growth: netbooks/FLOSS. In two years they will be able to supply much of the world’s need for IT without Wintel. Wintel will have to cut prices. We do not need many more features or more performance. Both hardware and software are now commodities that no small cabal controls. The cash cows have dried up and productivity and efficiency will yield profit, not monopoly. Expect continued strong growth in EMEA/BRIC/APEJ. The USA and all who cling will be seen as foolish to throw money at Wintel, just as they are for driving Cadillacs in a world with tight supplies of oil. Furthermore, a considerable portion of spending on IT in the recovery will be on cloud-computing, not pumping money into the monopoly but services off-campus.

“Over the next four years, IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year.”

While the downturn and the recovery will be modest by the usual measures of the monopoly, this will be a big bang of unprecedented proportions for FLOSS and hardware. Instead of more cores at higher clockspeed, a few cores at lower clockspeeds will yield the ultimate thin clients, tiny modules inside monitors or keyboards. Instead of pricing that the market will bear, money will be made on high-volume, low-cost parts that can be made anywhere in the world.

• One or two servers will be enough for SMBs like schools. These may even be off-campus in the cloud or head-office.
• No need for licensing fees or maintenance contracts because there is so little to go wrong.
• Scarcely any need for in-house maintenance.

Then, we can get on with our job of finding, changing, creating and displaying information instead of propping up monopolies. Freedom at last.