Browsing: Gartner

Sales of 3D printers, devices that allow users to create three-dimensional objects from scratch by adding successive layers of materials, are expected to surge in the next two or three years, new research from analyst firm Gartner claims. Worldwide shipments of 3D printers

On 18 July, Microsoft announced yearly profits of nearly US$22bn. Its shares immediately plunged by more than 11% and have yet to recover. What has made investors so nervous? Part of the problem is around expectations. Investment analysts had been expecting an additional $1,35bn in profit

Worldwide spending on information technology products and services will rise by only 2% in 2013, reaching US$3,7 trillion, analyst and research firm Gartner said on Tuesday. The growth rate has been revised downward from the 4,1% figure Gartner has expected previously. The reduction reflects the impact

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is at a crossroads. The company, with Microsoft, dominated the client-server era of computing. Its chips power most servers and PCs sold today. But the action in the computing industry is no longer in desktops and laptops, but rather in smartphones

A piece on US technology website ZDNet earlier this month, written by columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols, suggested that Windows 8 represents Microsoft’s “New Coke moment”. Others quickly jumped on the idea. The Financial Times led with a story on the subject, saying the fact that Microsoft

The personal computer industry is under severe pressure. New, preliminary data from research and analyst firm Gartner shows that 79,2m PCs were shipped in the first quarter of 2013, an 11,2% decline over the same quarter in 2012. This is the first time the number had fallen below 80m since the second quarter

Fans of the open-source Firefox Web browser, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, have long enjoyed the “Easter egg” in the software that takes a dig at Microsof t and its browser, Internet Explorer (IE). Typing in “about:mozilla” in the address bar has always brought up some clever

Anyone in doubt that Android is poised to be the Windows of the smartphone era, read on. Google’s market share of operating systems on smartphones leapt to 69,7% of the total market in the fourth quarter of 2012, from 51,3% a year earlier. That represents a 33% increase. During the

Smart, Internet-connected television sets will account for 85% of TV sales within the next few years, according to analyst firm Gartner, which predicts in a new research report that worldwide unit production of flat-panel smart TVs will grow from 69m in 2012 to 198m in 2016. Worldwide unit

The year 1975 was a bumper one for the personal computer. Nearly 50 000 of them were sold, hatching an entirely new market. Just a year or two earlier, only giant corporations could afford computers. Jump forward to 2012: between July and September 87m new PCs were shipped and more than