There's no question that digital technology has revolutionized photography. The statistics speak for themselves: not only have the past several years seen a boom in digital camera sales, but online photo sharing and printing services are proliferating everywhere. But Vamsi Sistla, director of broadband and residential entertainment research at ABI Research, says that we're looking at the new medium through an "old lens." What did most amateur snapshooters do with their analog pictures? They mounted them in albums. Family and friends could hold albums in their laps and share the viewing experience. What must most digital snapshooters do? View their pictures on a computer; upload them to a Web site (more computing); email them to each other (still more computing!) -- or have them printed for mounting in an old-fashioned album. While sharing via email is a step in the right direction, printing them and putting in old-fashioned albums is a step backwards. "What's needed," says Sistla, "is the digital equivalent of the old photo album: a stand-alone, tablet-shaped device with a nice big screen that will display pictures much as the old family album did."
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....