Smartphones and Tablets Dominate 2011 Predictions

While I don’t claim to be a technology Nostradamus, I’m offering some thoughts about the state and direction of some technologies I find interesting for the 2011 Technology and Telecom issue.

Smartphones and tablets will continue to be in a high-growth phase. This arena has turned into a battle between Apple’s iOS-based iPhone and iPad, and devices from a variety of manufacturers that are powered by Google’s Android operating system. BlackBerry’s fall from leadership to also-ran will continue at an increasing pace.

Google’s Android operating system, which is provided free to phone manufacturers, will easily win the race for number of smartphone units sold over the next year. The wild card in the race will be the potential sales bump to the iPhone when it becomes available on the Verizon network.

Android has issues to overcome. When reviews continually say the first application you should download is one that kills out-of-control multi-tasking applications, you know there are issues. Phone vendors have customized unique interfaces on top of Android, leading to various versions of Android phones with different release levels of the operating system. Combine that with the free-for-all Android app store and the results are varying levels of customer satisfaction.

Expect to see Apple’s rollout of the iPad 2 in the March-April time frame greatly extend the company’s leadership in the tablet market. Tablets based on the Android operating system don’t yet compare to the iPad in usability, screen size and price point. Verizon cut the price of the Samsung Galaxy Android tablet by $100 and started throwing in $60 of free movies to promote pre-Christmas volume.

Amazon’s Kindle sold 5.4 million units between August and Christmas as electronic book adoption increased. E-books will continue to get more entertaining, combining audio and video into versions targeted at tablet users.

Delivery of television and movies is in the process of being reinvented. Roku devices, wireless network-enabled TVs, NetFlix streaming, YouTube and Hulu services are just the beginning. Expect Yahoo to try and define itself as a media delivery company in 2011, while Google and Apple attempt to bring rapid growth to their efforts already in place.

The next year will continue to illustrate the troubles facing Microsoft. Without an operating system to compete with iOS or Android, smartphones and tablets will continue to eat steadily into sales of Windows devices. I don’t expect Microsoft to do much catching up with Apple and Google in 2011 in this space.

Microsoft will continue to be a strong player in the data center arena for years to come even though increased adoption of VMWare type virtualization will continue to limit the number of Windows servers replaced. Virtualization not only allows servers to be combined, but desktop virtualization will come into its own during 2011.

Desktop virtualization allows businesses to wring more life out of older Windows PCs as the horsepower needed to run applications shifts from the desktop machine to data center servers.

The key statistic behind the change to virtualization is this:  the typical business server today averages less than 10 percent processor utilization. Virtualization allows servers to be used much more efficiently.

As we’ve discussed in this column before, virtualization is part of the economics puzzle that makes cloud-based servers attractive from a pricing standpoint versus locally based “owned” servers.

I expect to see continued growth in the use of cloud-based servers and software by small and medium-sized businesses as the economics are better understood, security concerns are satisfied and the rapid access to business functionality is recognized.

To bring this full cirlcle, “mobility” is rapidly becoming a given in cloud-based software. Smartphones and tablets will be incorporated into software for use in viewing information and performing mobile business transactions – including barcode scanning.

There is a lot going on in technology. The next few years will be very interesting to watch and participate in. 

Steve Hankins is CEO and co-founder of Accio.US, a technology company providing advisory and management services for small- to medium-sized businesses. He may be reached at [email protected].