A world without desktops? No way!

We may all be going wireless and tossing out PBX but we are a long way from workdays without PCs. Many of us make our living with the very tools that are considered more of a commodity than a novelty (hey, even one of the pioneers is exiting the business). But here in the world of research, even the mundane can take on an interesting twist. So we dont take desktops or otherrun-of-the-mill technologies for granted in our little corner of the world.

Why do we think that desktops are interesting?We know from our IT priorities research data (we survey IT executives and managers from mid- to large-size companies what IT projects they are currently implementing, and which ones theyre planning for the next 12 and 24 months) that desktop upgrades, replacements and new deployments have been the #1 pure-play hardware priority for 10 of the last 12 months--accounting for roughly 20% of all hardware projects this year.

It's also intriguing that news about desktops appears to be pretty important in the grand scheme of technology. Nearly 10% of all the news read on CNET sites were about desktops, laptops and notebooks, which is a sizeable chunk of the news pie considering the myriad technologies we cover. But it gets even more interesting when we peel back a few layers to see which vendors are getting the most attention.

As you can see, Apple is the big winner, averaging 30-40% of total desktop news interest each month. Among the PC players, Dell is the clear leader, followed by HP, Sony, IBM, Toshiba, and Sun. But while this is how the news plays out, when our IT executives and managers tell us which desktops theyll be deploying, IBM comes out on top, followed by HP and Dell. This gap between the news and vendor preference is undoubtedly due to the fact that the IT Priorities sample is US only.