Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Sprint CEO to Pre Buyers: Get Your Sleeping Bags Ready
One of the simplest ways to create a shortage, and the buying frenzy that typically accompanies it, is to announce that there will be one. And this is precisely what Sprint CEO Dan Hesse did for the Palm Pre Tuesday. Speaking at J.P. Morgan’s Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference shortly after Sprint announced the handset’s street date, Hesse said he anticipates that supplies will be limited, at least initially.
PC vendors hoping for a sooner-than-expected recovery later this year best prepare themselves for disappointment. No quick recovery is likely, according to J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz, who says the PC market will remain in a shambles throughout 2009.
Global information technology spending will fare worse in 2009 than it did during the dotcom bust of 2001. That’s the grim news from Gartner, which Tuesday predicted that worldwide IT spending will slip to $3.2 trillion this year from $3.4 trillion in 2008. If that should happen, the drop will be the greatest decline in IT spending in nearly a decade.
Add another bulletin to the outpouring of somber predictions for the coming year. Global handset sales slowed in the fourth quarter of 2008 and aren’t expected to stabilize until 2010, Gartner said today.
Billionaire Warren Buffett says the economy will be in a shambles throughout “2009–and, for that matter, probably well beyond.” The same can apparently be said for the PC market. Research outfit Gartner on Monday warned that PC sales will suffer the “sharpest unit decline in history” this year. 
More gloomy predictions for the IT market. Market research firm IDC just updated its forecast for world-wide IT spending in 2009, and suffice to say, it’s not pretty. The continued downward spiral of the economy has so hampered growth that IDC now sees world-wide IT spending growing by just 0.5 percent year over year, down from a November 2008 forecast of 2.6 percent growth.
According to market-research outfits Gartner and IDC, PC shipment growth in the fourth quarter of 2008 was the worst since 2002. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker shows global PC shipments down 0.4 percent year over year. So much for that annual holiday season uptick.
Ugly news for the semiconductor industry: In 2009, it will suffer back-to-back years of declining revenue for the first time in its history. This according to Gartner, whose last official semiconductor outlook called for 2008 industry revenues to grow, if only a bit.
“We’re thrilled to report our best quarter ever.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs has uttered those words, or a variation on them, after most of the company’s earnings reports in recent memory. Will he speak them once again Tuesday, when Apple offers the outside world a peak at its financials? Or has the worsening economic crisis and the continued deterioration of consumer confidence stricken them from “Quarterly Earnings Statement” template in Apple PR for the time being?
If there was any comic relief during Tuesday’s Apple event, it was provided by Microsoft, which played Curly to CEO Steve Jobs’s Moe and COO Tim Cook’s Larry. Discussing the dramatic increase in the Mac’s market share in the past year, Cook said it was driven partially by “something we didn’t do: Vista.”
At first glance, the growth of the global personal computer market during the third quarter would seem to belie any notion of a vast economic downturn. Despite the financial crisis gripping Wall Street, PC shipments increased 15 percent from the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008, according to Gartner.
