RBOCs Entering the $50 Billion Multichannel Video Market Follow Different Product Development Strategies to Compete With MSOs -- According to Yankee Group, "Despite public statements to the contrary, we believe MSOs aren�t taking the threat of new competition lightly � and they shouldn�t: We estimate cable will lose subscribers at the rate of 0.5-1 percent per year. This is before the entry of new competition with a two-way network, with more bandwidth and potentially more advanced applications than the MSOs can provide. In the last 4 years, RBOCs have steadily lost residential wireline voice subscribers. Yankee estimates that about 4 percent of US households have dropped their wireline phones. In addition, a growing number of voice minutes are shifting to wireless. We expect traditional wireline voice revenue to decline by approximately 24 percent in the next 4 years. Alternative voice providers, including MSOs, will be important drivers of this revenue erosion. We anticipate that cable�s VoIP product will gain 12 million homes by year-end 2008. The RBOCs have their backs up against a wall and cannot postpone new product development."
Enterprise AI budgets are flowing in two directions at once, and only one of them builds an asset the buyer actually controls. Gartner's latest forecast puts worldwide AI spending at $2.7 trillion in 2026, but the composition of that figure matters far more than the total. Executives who read only the headline will miss the tension between what they are buying and what they actually own. The Number Behind the Number Gartner projects 2026 AI spending is a 49.5 percent increase over 2025, with $3.6 trillion forecast for 2027. AI infrastructure accounts for $1.5 trillion of this year's total, more than half. Gartner's John-David Lovelock calls the data center buildout the largest infrastructure project humanity has undertaken, and describes demand as inelastic even as memory prices climb. Compute Concentration is a Sovereignty Issue Gartner expects hyperscalers and service providers buying AI-optimized servers to remain the largest single area of spending. For an enterprise, t...