Gartner: PC sales are in permanent decline thanks to tablets

Overall, personal computer sales were in permanent decline in the first quarter, thanks to the continued popularity of tablets, and the trend is expected to intensify going forward.

And there’s nothing an anticipated surge in ultramobiles can do to stop it, according to market research firm Gartner. The firm says that the outcome will be anemic growth rates for Microsoft’s Windows’ market share in 2013 as Google’s Android continue to grow in popularity.

Gartner has estimated that for 2013 we will see about 2.4 billion devices shipped-– that’s PCs, tablets and mobile phones combined, growing 9 percent over last year's comparable numbers.

The firm said that for 2017, we should see about 2.9 billion units moved but what people will be buying between now and then will change substantially.

However, beginning with the 2nd quarter, the news will be bad for desktop PCs and notebook OEMs, but good for tablet and smartphone makers-- at least according to Gartner.

The overall number of PCs sold this year will fall 7.6 percent compared to last year to 315 million units, with the only bright spot being ultramobiles, which will most likely increase 140 percent to about 23.2 million units.

Overall shipments will surge 69 percent to 197 million units, Gartner suggests, while smartphones will make up an ever-increasing slice of the the mobile phone segment.

Of the 1.875 billion mobile phones Gartner predicts will be sold this year, a whopping 1 billion units are predicted to be smartphones, compared with 675 million units in 2012, out of 1.746 billion.

Gartner also accredited this new trend to a proliferation of lower-priced tablets and smartphones, and their overall growing capability, which means that consumers spend more time fondling screens than punching keys and moving mice.

The analyst firm added that tablets are also becoming the consumer's main computing device, and that Apple's iPad gets the lion's share of tablets sold in 2012.

Gartner called this a permanent shift rather than a temporary trend induced by a "more austere economic environment".

Research vice president Carolina Milanesi said in a statement-- "As consumers shift their time away from their PC to tablets and smartphones, they will no longer see their PC as a device that they need to replace on a regular basis."

The shift also means that Windows will struggle to grow. Gartner expects just a mere 2.1 percent growth in market share to 354 million units in 2013, compared to a 73 percent increase for Android, to 861 million units, and to 37 percent for Mac and iOS to 293 million.

Going forward, there is a bit of hope for the world’s largest software maker. By 2017, Gartner estimates a second-place fight between Windows and Apple’s iOS-Mac, with 570 million and 504 million units to be sold by the Redmond and Cupertino camps respectively.

Android will continue to dominate the number-one spot, with 1.46 billion units sold. Gartner doesn’t break out by device type. Instead, it simply combines iOS and Mac from Apple and throws in Windows for Intel and ARM tablets and Windows Phone into the same report, even though the platforms are all different.

The suggestion from Gartner is that Microsoft’s phone 8 or tablet 8 strategies will have gained some traction and that its devices will be selling in larger numbers four years from now, but not before.

A NEW DIGITAL CURRENCY: BITCOIN

If you think you've seen and heard everything, well you probably haven't. In fact the writing was on the wall for all of us to see. There's now a new currency available but it's not exactly physical. It's not paper, and it's not gold or silver either. But it's not exactly new since it was launched four years ago.

What we're referring to is Bitcoin, a new 'digital' currency launched in 2009. Similar to PayPal but different. Unlike PayPal, Bitcoin trades like a real currency since it's value can go up and down considerably in just one day.

Bitcoin's value has surged 50 percent in recent days, but a currency exchange service outage and an unrelated hacker attack knocked its value down quite a bit in just a few days.

The 'peer-to-peer currency' which was languishing in the midteens in January surged past $100 on Monday and was trading as high as $147 today before an hour-long service outage at Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, pushed its value back down to $115.

The currency rebounded a bit yesterday to close at $123, a 500 percent increase in the past two months. Mt. Gox initially blamed the outage on a surge in trading volume that created a lag in trading and order cancellations.

But the exchange said it was experiencing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Meanwhile, Bitcoin wallet company Instawallet announced today that it has suspended its service indefinitely after being hacked. Bitcoin has been so popular in fact that it's now attracting such problems as DDoS attacks and other security threaths.

"Our database was fraudulently accessed, due to the very nature of Instawallet it is impossible to reopen the service as-is," Instawallet said in a statement posted to its Web site. "In the next few days we are going to open the claim process for Instawallet balance holders to claim the funds they had stored before the service interruption."

The service detailed its plans for handling claims submissions as thus: "For the first 90 days we will accept claims for individual Instawallets. Your wallet's URL and key will be used to pre-populate a form to file the claim."

After 90 days, if no other claim has been received for the same url, your Instawallet balance under 50 BTC will be refunded. If several claims have been filed for the same URL, we will process those claims on a case by case basis, under the presumption that the claim we received first belongs to the legitimate account holder.

While Instawallet did not indicate whether any funds were lost in the hacker attack, the Bitcoin platform has been a frequent target for criminal activity including thefts, hacks, and scams. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars was stolen in one such virtual heist last year.

Launched four years ago to intentionally avoid the prying eyes of law enforcement officials, the virtual currency has been gaining traction with investors in recent months as its acceptance has grown.

WordPress announced last November that it would begin accepting Bitcoin as payment for upgrades on the popular blogging platform. The currency platform gained more backing last month when Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, reached an agreement with CoinLab to manage the exchange's operations in the United States and Canada.

Some analysts also believe that Bitcoin's growing popularity in recent weeks is also due to the recent banking crisis in Europe, specifically in Cypress that resulted in several banks being closed for nearly two weeks in mid-March.

Overall demand for the currency has been especially great in countries like Greece and Spain, where investors are worried that they will be next to feel the threat of deposit taxes, said Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at financial technology company ConvergEx Group.

PGP is already 22 years old, and now it might be revitalized

It was 1991 when Phil Zimmerman, Jon Callas and the rest of their security team brought about encryption technology to the masses, and for free. Now the same people, with some backing from a few former Navy SEALs will make the technology even more secure in the coming weeks.
Know as PGP (pretty good privacy), the technology has proven itself as reliable and with a level of security that is satisfactory for most applications.
Users download the software and all traffic is handled by the company's web hosting company. Encryption keys are set up on each device using the application and are then discarded once the message has been completed, so that they cannot be compromised.
The encryption system is based on decades of encryption experience and the desire for private communications. Based on the team's background, there's good reason to believe it will be successful.
PGP was investigated by the U.S. government for "munitions export without a license" after use of the code spread, although no charges were ever brought against Zimmerman, Callas and the rest of the team.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, security wasn't really an issue when email was designed, and PGP addressed a key need for internet users when it came out as PGP.
Thankfully, governments around the world recognized that the benefits of encryption have far outweighed the threat, and now similar systems are built into almost every online transaction, but it's still not enough some observers say.
"Email is fundamentally broken," said Jon Callas, pointing out that security was not a serious factor in the original protocols. Wrapping messages in the best possible encryption will give a measure of security, and the team have spent nearly two years improving their technology.
"We believe we've got it as good as we can get it," he said. "Nothing is perfect, and anything we find there's a problem with, we'll fix it."
To further test the system, Callas and his team put its source code up on Github for analysis by the security community. So far, Callas said, three possible issues have been found. None of them were serious, and all have since been fixed.
Two of PGP's original backers, including CEO Mike Janke, are former U.S. Navy SEALs who saw a need for this kind of secure communication. Janke was operating a security detail in Baghdad and became increasingly frustrated with the inability to run a simple, secure communications setup.
It was an issue he'd seen around the world, where the presumption of monitoring by outsiders is the norm. You might think that technology like this would have the U.S. government worried, but according to Callas the response so far has been very positive.
"We've checked with a bunch of people on it and talked to people inside the government. We hired on contract a private attorney who used to be a terrorism prosecutor. She advises us and has been our envoy to Congress and other places. We know they need to hear about us first," Callas said.
Such issues are much on the mind of legislators of late. Intelligence agencies are pushing for an extension of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to require an automatic backdoor into communications software of this type. A legislative push in the area is expected later this year.
There's increasing concern about doing business abroad, now that some states seem to have built industrial espionage into their economic policy.