Gartner: Apple to double computer market share

At the start of the next decade, Apple will have doubled its US and Western European market share in computers, analyst firm Gartner has predicted.

The claim was that competitors will fail in matching Apple's software innovation. With the success of products like the iPod and iPhone, computer users were looking for hardware which was simple to use with them. Researchers suggested that Apple's competitors will simply not do a good enough job in providing it.

The claims were made as part of Gartner's ten key predictions for IT and business in 2008 and beyond. This included a prediction four years from now that 50 per cent of travelling workers would be using smaller business devices rather than notebooks because of their lighter size and weight. By the same year, Gartner also predicted that 80 per cent of all commercial software would include elements of open-source technology.

By 2009, Gartner predicted that more than a third of IT organisations would have one or more green choices in their top six criteria for IT-related goods. Rather than being motivated by the needs of the environment, it was claimed that this was more to do with companies trying to cut costs of their power requirements.

"Selected from across our research areas as the most compelling and critical predictions, the trends and topics they address this year indicates a strong focus on individuals, the environment and alternative ways of buying and selling IT services and technologies," Daryl Plummer, managing vice president of Gartner, said of the findings. "These areas of focus imply a significant groundswell of change that may in turn change the entire industry."

One of the final predictions was that end-users would decide as much as half of all software, hardware and service acquisitions in IT by 2010. Gartner said that this was because the internet made it very easy for individuals to make decisions about technology for business use. In turn this meant that IT organisations were starting to make the move to incorporate user decisions in risk analysis and business strategy.

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