Woe betide unto you, CIOs, for your judgement approacheth!
Gartner: 2012 Will Be the Year of Apocalyptic Reckoning for CIOs
Wow! A whole year of apocalyptic reckoning! That’s a lot of reckoning. Admittedly, CIOs have a lot of sins to answer for. Like… well, everything.
On second thought, a year may not be enough. Who’s down for this being the decade of CIO reckoning?
The key takeaway is that, thanks to the cloud, IT spending is increasingly no longer under the control of the IT department, so CIOs are going to find their roles and responsibilities greatly diminished (if not eliminated entirely) unless they can radically change everything about the IT function’s relationship to the enterprise.
OK, yes, Gartner is the clown-shoe wearing firm that famously suggested Apple should get out of the hardware business. (No, we will never forget that, Gartner. Sorry! And, no, we’re not actually sorry.) So why should we expect that its crystal ball is any less smeared with Vaseline (don’t ask) than it was back in 2006? Well, we shouldn’t. Although, Gartner knows a lot more about corporate IT than it does about Apple, so there’s that.
If Gartner’s right, though, this can’t be good news for Microsoft. Which is a contributing factor to why the outlook for Windows 8 is cloudy with a chance of disappointment balls.
Windows 8 isn’t even in beta yet, but IDC is already predicting that very few PC owners will upgrade from Windows 7 to it. And that’s just for a start—the company also predicts that Windows 8 tablets look to be a bust as well.
After languishing on XP for eight years, IT shops really had no choice but to upgrade to Windows 7. (Particularly with Microsoft helpfully telling them they would be cutting XP support nnnnnnNOW! No, wait… NOW! … Now?) Now, having just gone through a major upgrade, do you think they’re going to be in the mood to do another one? In this economy? When we don’t even know the long-term status of Community? Besides, most of these people can’t even consider upgrading more than their home machines since they’ve been laid off. Those that haven’t been laid off have seen their 3-year budgets cut to “a handful of flash drives and a torx screwdriver.”
But Windows 8 tablets? Come on! Consumers are dying to run full Office apps on a 9-inch screen, aren’t they?
Given that Windows 8 seems largely designed for tablets, how will Windows 8 tablets fare? IDC is again unimpressed, and expects Windows 8 tablet sales in 2012 to be “disappointing.”
IDC isn’t alone in that. Forrester recently warned that because Windows 8-based tablets will be so late to market, they’ll likely fail against the iPad, Android tablets, the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes and Noble NOOK.
Here the Macalope thought that Microsoft was somehow beating Apple to the future that it created. Which, strangely, is a future that some companies are are enjoying… today. It’s complicated.
Apparently.
[Editors’ Note: Each week the Macalope skewers the worst of the week’s coverage of Apple and other technology companies. In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]