In a recent study Forrester Research asked the question, Will Consumers Pay For A Media Center PC? -- "Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard sell PCs running Microsoft's Windows Media Center software that allows consumers to work with digital media, including music, video, and photos. But are consumers interested in these features? To find out, we surveyed 5,000 households in Forrester's Consumer Technographics North American Study. Our resulting data shows that while as many as 25 percent of consumers are interested in media and entertainment activities on their PCs, only half of these will pay � and most won't pay more than $100 for the features. The study also uncovered that consumers who will pay for media activities want to do so only once."
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....