"Many mature service industries are in a service arms race in which they keep adding more and more services cumulatively over time. But consumers don't always want "more and more"�what they're looking for are unique combinations of attributes. You see that with the success of the airline JetBlue, for example: It has no meals and no round-trip airfares, but it does have leather seats and personal entertainment centers that delight and surprise its passengers. JetBlue's unique combination of features is what gives it a unique position in the market. "
Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....