Gartner Group Sees No Threat To Wintel

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October 13, 1998 (9:40 AM EDT)

By John Gartner,

Although there will be huge changes in computing technologies in the next five years, the companies that pull the strings will be the same, according to Gartner Group, a research company based in Stamford, Conn.

At Gartner Group's annual IT/Expo in Orlando, Fla., Monday, analysts said they projected the PC industry will see rapid growth in new markets and continue its "bigger, smarter, faster" trend.

Gartner analysts said they predicted PC penetration will rise from 43 percent of U.S. households today to 63 percent by 2002. The aggressive projections forecast rewritable DVD drives will compete with, and eventually supplant, VCRs for video recording, and children will shun Nintendo game consoles for technically superior PCs.

According to Gartner, PC sales will more than double from 80 million in 1997 to nearly 180 million units in 2002, fueled largely by demand from developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil.

In a session on desktop PC trends, Dataquest analyst Martin Reynolds said PCs will soon no longer be measured in MHz, but in GHz, surpassing the 2-GHz mark. Standard features of the PC of 2002, Reynolds said, will likely include a 30-gigabyte hard drive, 128 megabytes of RAM, a rewritable DVD drive, and 100-megabit-per-second Ethernet network adapters.

Those specifications may seem like science fiction to today's desktop computer users, but reliance on Windows and Intel's processor architecture will be reality, according to Reynolds.

"The industry is moving to a complete Intel architecture and Microsoft NT solution from server to client device," he said.

Microsoft's Win CE mobile computing platform, code-named Jupiter, and Intel's StrongArm processors will make significant inroads in the handheld and PDA markets, he added.

"There are no significant threats to the Intel or Microsoft desktop PC franchises through 2003," said Chris Goodhue, another PC analyst at Gartner. Goodhue added the Java-reliant network computer market, previously positioned as a viable alternative to Wintel, won't reach more than 1 million units per year and will thus remain a niche device.

But despite Gartner Group's rosy outlook for the Wintel platform, the research company also warned about adopting new products too quickly. Win NT 5.0, scheduled to ship in mid-1999, won't be widely available until 2000, Goodhue said, and he suggested IT managers wait six to nine months before deploying it. He also said it would be wise to wait until after Microsoft releases the first NT 5.0 service pack upgrade to fix bugs.

Microsoft's goal of moving Windows users to NT won't happen as quickly as the company would like. "Plan on Windows 9.x being part of your administration requirements in 2002 and beyond," Goodhue said.

Likewise, Intel's 64-bit Merced processor won't be adopted widely in desktop PCs before 2002, but will remain a server chip. Reynolds said mainframes will continue to have performance advantages over microprocessor-based servers through at least the next four to five years.

The PC's continued growth will keep not only Intel and Microsoft healthy, but will also mean strong bottom lines for PC manufacturers such as IBM, Dell, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard, the analysts said.