Mobile Devices To Soon Overwhelm PCs, Says Gartner

By 2014, the installed base of devices based on lightweight mobile operating systems, such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows 8, will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based systems.

-- Peter Sondergaard, Gartner, Inc.

This extraordinary prediction is one of many in a recent presentation by Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at IT research and advisory company Gartner, Inc..

Much of Sondergaard's talk is wildly optimistic about the growth and impact of IT developments on industry. You thought all the big changes and productivity boosts were over? Mr. Sondergaard said two-thirds of CEOs believe IT will make a greater contribution to their industry in the next 10 years than any prior decades.

It's a time to re-imagine IT. Resources are moving to the cloud. Social networking techniques will infiltrate corporate procedures. There will be an explosion of information.

Can you really do a lot of typing on this thing?

But it's this claim that mobile devices will displace desktop computers that most caught my eye. As a simple matter of extrapolating current trends maybe you could see it happening, but the death, or at least the marginalization, of the desktop computer has been predicted many times. I'll believe it when I see it.

It's often said that mobiles, especially tablets, are information consumption, not information production devices. The basic difference is that you can't type a whole lot on them, and there's a lot that people do with computers, especially in business, that requires information production. Maybe they're going to sell a lot of tablets, but people are going to use them in addition to their computers.

Do you disagree? Do you actually do a lot of writing on your iPad? Tell me about it in a comment. This I gotta hear.