Robert Pogson

Gartner is mostly about business use of IT but they miss the point that government and education are huge businesses with major shifts in IT happening today, not 2 to 10 years down the road.

Gartner: “Among the 43 technologies listed (see Figure 1), 24 will mature within the next five years, and 20 of them will have a transformational or high impact on businesses,” said Sanish KB, research analyst at Gartner. “Some technologies, such as cloud computing, data deduplication and virtualization, enable new ways of doing business across industries, which will result in a major shift in industry dynamics and will also lead to the creation of a new and improved — and sustainable — ecosystem. Some technologies will become mainstream in less than two years.”

The only FLOSS technology listed on their Hype cycle is software development tools… Where was Gartner when

• Dell announced they were shipping GNU/Linux in 1000 retail stores in India? That’s a huge shift in retail IT and works well with the price-sensitivity of India.
• ELCOT was buying GNU/Linux notebooks in bulk for education? 300K GNU/Linux notebooks shipping in a market of a few million per quarter where Dell and Lenovo are the top suppliers and both are shipping GNU/Linux is a huge shift from Wintel and it’s not hype but action. Expect other OEMs to ship GNU/Linux in India in a big way.
• The government of India subsidized cheap tablet computers for students running Android/Linux? Again hundreds of thousands of units will ship, crossing the digital divide and changing how IT is done in India today, not just a few years down the road. Further, when these students join the workforce, the workforce of India will change suddenly from computer illiterate to experienced. That will happen well within five years at this rate.
• Today both GNU/Linux and Android/Linux are FLOSS tools for work and development and they are not five years away but now.
• 8 years ago IDC reported that GNU/Linux notebooks were selling well in India? While other countries had GNU/Linux on hype. Indians were buying and selling reality. Today GNU/Linux has an even larger share of the low-end market because prices for hardware are now affordable by Indians: individuals, schools, governments and businesses.
• GNU/Linux in education in India is not just a trickle? It’s huge: “IT@School had become the largest venture across the globe to make use of free software. About 50 lakh students and two lakh teachers are currently using free software in the State” That’s in a single state of India. A lake is 100K people so that’s 5 million students adn 200K teachers in one state. The savings? “When the IT@School made a saving of Rs.11 crore for the State by using free software last year, this year’s saving had gone up to Rs.14 crore, he pointed out.” (1 crore = 10 million)

So, Gartner needs to broaden its horizons. What kids are learning in school is more than hype and it will jumpstart the Indian IT ecosystem promptly and Gartner had none of it, except “software development tools” and “media tablets”, ignoring completely that FLOSS is widespread in India today. That’s no hype.

see Gartner 2012 Hype Cycle for ICT In India Evaluates Technologies And Services Set To Impact Indian Enterprises Over The Next 10 Years.

Those who claim old-fashioned PC dominate and continue to dominate IT missed something. I missed it too. For the first time in recent memory the consumption of DRAM, the fast memory used in PCs, is less than 50% in old-fashioned PCs. Tablets and smart phones are taking a huge chunk of IT by any measure.

I would bet some people keep a warm hand on their smart phone more than their keyboard or mouse. DRAM holds software and data currently active in a computer. That DRAM usage is a leading indicator of how people are doing their IT. We have known for a couple of years that numbers of small cheap computers were increasing dramatically but I did not think to tally up how much software and data they actually use. It’s a lot. The old-fashioned PC took a few decades to reach its current level of consumption. Small cheap computers did it in just a few years. This is a game-changer. This is not a blip/fad/temporary phenomenon. Wintel is crumbling.

Oh, one more thing. iSuppli says there will be 519 million new smart phones this year and Android/Linux will reach 1000 million cumulative smart phones by next year. That’s a lot of RAM. Manufacturers of RAM and everything else in IT are noticing they don’t have to supply Wintel to make money.

“In a significant changing of the guard that also reflects the growing dominion of media tablets like the iPad from Apple Inc., PCs during the second quarter accounted for less than half of the market for dynamic random access memory (DRAM)—the first time that share by traditionally the strongest consumer of the memory type fell below 50 percent, according to an IHS iSuppli DRAM Dynamics brief from information and analytics provider IHS.”

via PC Share of DRAM Market Dips Below 50 Percent for First Time – The IHS iSuppli®.