“The mobile PC industry is undergoing significant change,” NPD senior analyst Richard Shim said in a statement. “The rapid rise and establishment of white box tablet PCs … is putting pressure on traditional notebook PCs … resulting in cannibalization by tablet PCs.”

NPD’s latest report suggests that tablet shipments will grow 67 percent this year to 256.5 million and will reach a massive 579.4 million in 2017. In contrast, laptop or notebook PCs will decline 10 percent over the same period, dropping from 203.3 million to 183.3 million.

But there are two bright spots for laptops.

Source: NPD

Global mobile PC shipments – 2012-2017

First, the portion of the notebook market that is touch-enabled will grow 48 percent in 2014, from almost nothing in 2012 to close to 100 million in 2015 and increasing each of the following two years. That’s driven by the increasing importance of touch in computing platforms of all kinds, the need for laptop manufacturers to innovate, and also by Intel’s proclamation that third-generation Ultrabooks using the chip-maker’s new Haswell processors must include touch.

And second, the premium ultra-slim laptop market — such as Ultrabooks and Apple’s MacBook Air — will account for two-thirds of touch-enabled notebooks in 2013, and 80 percent by 2017.

Missing in action, however, is Windows 8.

“Thus far, Windows 8 has had a limited impact on driving touch adoption in notebook PCs, due to a lack of applications needing touch and the high cost of touch on notebook PCs,” Shim says.

The biggest driver for touch and tablet adoption, NPD says, is white-box tablet manufacturers. Increasingly, small, regional brands are building Android-based tablets — especially in China — and distributing them in emerging markets where laptops have never really gained a foothold. These white-box brands accounted for a full third of tablet shipments in 2012, and NPD expects that percentage to remain steady over the next few years.

The key take-away for PC manufacturers?

Differentiate by building form factors that are not traditional PCs and are not traditional clamshell laptops. The challenge, of course, is reduced price, reduced margin, and increasing regional competition.

It’s enough, perhaps, to make the big manufacturers wish for the good old days of the netbook.

Image credit: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

With all this talk of disruption in the enterprise, young founders should not underestimate legacy vendors. Business software behemoths like SAP and Oracle have their eye on the big trends, whether it’s cloud, “big data” or mobile computing, and are finding ways to filter out the most innovative technologies from the noise.

At CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s recent customer-focused cloud conference, I caught up with Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer at SAP, who specializes in technology and product innovation. That afternoon, Poonen was joined on stage by one of the company’s biggest healthcare customers McKesson to discuss ongoing concerns about the cloud and their reasons for selecting SAP.

In this ensuing discussion, Poonen revealed that SAP has hedged its bets on its own big data solution, known as HANA. He told me that IT will be “transformed” by big data. In 2013, he said, “a lot of the hype goes out [the door] and the substance starts to show up.”

Watch the video for more of SAP’s predictions on the big tech trends for the coming year.

SAP (Source) from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SAN FRANCISCO — “Are you pumped up and ready to go? We are here to excite you!” Marc Benioff addressed a screaming crowd at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this morning, after an opening performance by rapper MC Hammer.

It’s hard to believe this is a vendor-led cloud computing conference. The outspoken Salesforce took the stage for his keynote address at Dreamforce 2012 with one clear message: A “social revolution” is taking place, and his company wants to be the driving force behind it.

The social revolution

Benioff claimed that in the evolution of computing, entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Dorsey have ushered trends like cloud and mobile, which have led to a shift to social business. He later claimed that the social revolution is a “trust revolution.” Not sure I buy it, but his overarching point is that customer satisfaction is becoming a central concern for enterprise startups. Why? Because social media has given them a voice.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s stock price fell 7 percent today in the first full day of trading after it lost a big patent lawsuit with Apple.

A jury in San Jose, Calif., awarded Apple a $1.05 billion judgment for violating patents related to the iPhone. Apple had alleged that it took five years to design the iPhone and Samsung copied it in three months. Shares of Samsung fell 89,000 South Korean Wan ($78.38) to 1.19 million SKW ($1,043.88). That was the largest decline since October 2008 for the Korean electronics giant, and it amounted to a loss of $12 billion in market value.

Samsung called the verdict “a loss for the American consumer” and promised to appeal. Apple is expected to file for injunctions against Samsung’s products that allegedly violate the patents. If the Apple injunctions are upheld, Samsung’s smartphone sales could take a big hit. Samsung sold 52 million smartphones in the second quarter. Analyst said that Samsung’s earnings could take a 4 percent to 5 percent hit this year due to increased patent-related set asides.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Acer’s new Iconia Tab A100 tablet goes on sale today and only one major thing separates it from the flock of Android tablets currently available: it’s the first Honeycomb tablet with a 7-inch display. That means you get all the features of Android optimized for a tablet in a smaller, lighter form factor.

With their wide-ranging models and prices, Android tablets have collectively wrestled 20 percent of the media-based tablet market from the mega-popular Apple iPad. The Iconia Tab A100 will soon add to those numbers as Android tablets continue to dent the iPad’s strong lead.

The Iconia Tab A100 runs Nvidia’s 1-GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor and features a 1024 x 600 touch screen, a 5-megapixel camera on back with LED flash, 2-megapixel cam on front and 1GB of RAM. For physical connections, it has an HDMI port, a MicroUSB 2.0 slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Acer claims a battery life of five hours, but we’d bet it’s lower in real testing. In terms of other capabilities, the machine can record 720p HD video at 30 frames per second, and Flash Player 10.3 and Acer’s LumiRead ereader app are both preloaded.

One of the nicest things about the Iconia Tab is its price, running $329.99 for 8GB of storage and $349.99 for 16GB. And there is a microSD slot that accepts up to 32GB cards if you need more storage.

Are you excited about the Acer Iconia Tab A100?