Many tech industry giants will scramble to sustain relevance because of the convergence of mobile devices, social networking, and cloud-based computing and data storage, IDC predicts in a new study.
Mobile devices, which earlier this year outshipped personal computers worldwide, will in 2012 generate more revenue than PCs for the first time, IDC said. Shipments of mobile devices will outstrip PCs by two to one, and 85 million mobile applications, or apps, will be downloaded. More money will be spent on mobile data networks than on networks tethered by lines.
The rapid transition to mobile, driven by an explosion of tablet computers, will challenge both traditional computer software companies like Microsoft and beneficiaries like Apple, which is seeing the dominance of its iOS operating system challenged by the open source Android operating system developed by Google.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which IDC said would take 20 percent of the tablet market in 2012, will be a particularly successful device. While the Fire runs on Android, Google has no involvement with the product. Mr. Gens called the Fire “a phenomenal content device,” which he predicted Amazon will produce in larger formats that will make it more useful for business functions like creating and sending data in a couple of years.
The increasing number of people and machines online will additionally create an explosion of digital data. IDC said that the amount of data stored in 2012 would increase 48 percent from 2011, to 2.7 zetabytes, or 2.7 billion terabytes. By 2015, the firm said, the total will be 8 zetabytes.
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