Sources who declined to be named because they are forbidden to talk publicly about Apple’s plans tell AllThingsD that the company has been “borrowing” engineers from the OS X 10.9 team as part of an effort to double down on iOS 7. “Yes, yes — it’s essentially a repeat of the iPhone/Leopard scenario,” one source said, referring to Apple’s 2007 decision to pull engineers from OS X 10.5 to work on iPhone. “Not as much of a fire drill, though. It will ship on time.”

News of Apple’s iOS 7 scramble was first reported by Daring Fireball last month, and reiterated today by Bloomberg.

So what is it about iOS 7 that has caused Apple to rally additional engineering resources? It’s a pretty big update. With SVP of Industrial Design Jony Ive now oveerseeing interface design, sources say Apple has adopted a unified approach to software and hardware design. And evidently the spartan, elegant aesthetic that Ive has developed around Apple’s hardware is now being brought to bear on its software, as well. Last week, 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman reported that iOS 7 would feature a “flat” design that favors simplicity over flash. I’ve heard similar descriptions from sources who say iOS 7 is iOS “de-glitzed.”

“Put it this way,” said one source who has been briefed on iOS. “You know Game Center’s green felt craps table? Well, goodbye, Circus Circus.”

Not a surprise, really. With Scott Forstall — an advocate for flashy, skeuomorphic design and its stitched-leather and faux-wood-grain flourishes — now gone from Apple, and Ive in an expanded role, the current and former Apple employees I’ve spoken to say iOS 7 was destined for a new coat of paint. As one said, “Sounds like a much-needed ‘de-Forstallization.’”

Which is not to say that the design of iOS 7 is entirely about removing skeuomorphic gloss. Fact is, Apple hasn’t much changed the operating system’s look since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. If the company has good ideas for design tweaks, it’s about time it implemented them. With new mobile operating systems like BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone proving that there’s plenty of room left for innovation in the market, Apple can ill afford even the risk of the perception that iOS might be getting dusty.

Apple’s challenge, then, is to overhaul the look and feel of the OS while retaining the intuitiveness that has made it so popular. “The key question here is whether those changes deliver on the core Apple promise of improving customers’ ability to make productive use of the device and deliver a clearly superior experience,” Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told AllThingsD. “Presumably they don’t need the flashy stuff to realize that vision.”

Image copyright Suzanne Tucker

I make this assertion because if we look closely, we can already see what will cause the decline of Silicon Valley. In fact, the valley’s residents are consciously planting the seeds of the valley’s own demise. What’s more, I believe many of them will celebrate when the valley is no longer on top.

My cheery assessment depends on this sleight of words: Decline is relative, and the decline that Silicon Valley faces will be less like watching Hewlett-Packard slip into irrelevance and more like proudly standing to one side as the rest of the world — eventually even the less-developed world — catches up to it. Thus, the “decline” I claim the valley seeks and will eventually succumb to is a most desirable decline, indeed.

Digital disruption — a force that Silicon Valley gestated and nursed from its earliest days — is now global. Digital devices, the networks that connect them, and the software tools that prod human beings to hanker for more of all these things will soon be everywhere. The long-term effect of rising digital disruption will be to redistribute the benefits of the future across the planet even as it continues to improve the already futuristic valley that started it all. What does Silicon Valley have today that other places will eventually enjoy as well? Access to three things the valley currently has in spades:

• Knowledge. With ubiquitous sensors in every device we own or location we frequent, we will soon collect in a single day far more information than we could have stored in all the hard disks manufactured prior to 2000. But that information is meaningless if we can’t render it into knowledge, which granted the smart people of Silicon Valley an early edge that they are now giving away for free. Analytics available to even the lowest YouTube channel producer now rival the most sophisticated reports CBS, NBC and ABC had available in the 1980s. Apply even better analytical engines to the data from Fitbit pedometers, Google Glass and the myriad of sensors that will listen to the stress in our voices or identify behaviors that undermine our health, and you’ve got an unprecedented depth and breadth of knowledge available soon to anyone, anywhere.
• Tools. Knowing something is nice, but being able to act on that knowledge is even better. Digital disruption depends on the distribution of tools — most of them free or nearly free — that equip anyone who wants to use knowledge to initiate and test a new concept. Kickstarter and its peers provide this opportunity for thousands of people who want to test their ideas; Amazon can make anyone a merchant partner, an affiliate, or an author, all for no cost; and the Square card reader just helped local merchants sell $800,000 worth of goods and services around the Super Bowl on game day in New Orleans.
• Capital. It’s not that there’s money going around. But thanks to the knowledge and digital tools available to you, you need a whole lot less of it to bring your idea to fruition. I recently spoke to Charles Teague, CEO of FitNow, the company behind the wildly successful LoseIt! calorie- and weight-tracking app. A veteran of the startup business from the earliest days at Allaire, Charles described for me with a slight tone of disbelief in his own words how cheaply he can launch and manage a company today compared to even ten years ago. This is partly because the tools are cheaper — you can open your Amazon Web Services account with a credit card — but also because much of the value digital disruptors deliver today comes through software. And as a successful entrepreneur who had sold his company to Qualcomm told me last year, “It’s just software; I can do anything in software for $40,000.”

People fond of wine and cheese will argue that there’s more to valley life than just these three things. That’s certainly true, but when you have more knowledge, tools and capital, some of the other things the valley prizes become common elsewhere as well. A culture of achievement, for example. As only people who have lived in a subculture that keeps them down know, the valley is a unique place where even surfers think they can be the next startup billionaires, leading to the creation of a company like GoPro.

It’s presumptuous of me to suggest that all valley residents will be so happy to be dethroned, even if the decline is only relative to the rise of the rest of the world. Venture capitalists, lawyers and politicians will feel the relative decline the most because their services have long been offered under the presumption that the value they provide is scarce, an assumption that’s now patently false. Other valley residents will be pleased, at least if Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera, is any indication. As he told me in an interview for my new book, “Digital Disruption,” “I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree. “

He actually talks like that. And that’s what makes him and many others like him the planters of the same seeds that will sow the relative decline of Silicon Valley by lifting everybody else up to join it. Even — perhaps especially — Detroit, home of over 250 Kickstarter projects.

James McQuivey is the author of “Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation.” He is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption.

If so, you’re in luck. There are a handful of options for getting packages delivered in time for Christmas, especially if you live in one of the markets where retailers are testing same-day delivery services.

In case you didn’t already know, today was pretty much the deadline for consumers to place orders online and to reasonably expect their packages to arrive on time. For example, Sears, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Walmart and even Amazon stopped offering rush shipping this afternoon on most orders.

As I previously reported, last week was the peak for e-commerce spending, and this year that shouldn’t be any different. But there are a number of ways to still get deliveries sent to your home if you don’t feel like fighting the crowds at the mall.

Amazon is promising on-time deliveries for some orders placed on Saturday and Sunday for some items in select cities. But it won’t be free. For those with Amazon Prime, it will cost $4 and up — on top of the $79 you pay every year to be a member.

Then there’s same-day delivery. Though the services are being characterized as tests, these merchants are trying to see if it can be economical to deliver items that are kept locally at stores (and not at distant warehouses) to homes within a few hours. It’s clearly another strategy for brick-and-mortar retailers to try to compete with e-tailers that offer the convenience of delivery.

Two of the major trials are being conducted by eBay and Walmart.

EBay’s service is called eBay Now. Consumers can place orders from a mobile app that will deliver goods to you at your home, in a park, even at a bar, within about an hour. The company is working with a number of local retailers on the service, including Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Toys “R” Us and Bloomingdales.

According to an eBay spokeswoman, eBay Now will be available from 9 am to 6 pm (local time) on Christmas Eve, but closed on Christmas Day. The service is currently being tested in San Francisco and parts of New York City.

Walmart is another retailer that is testing same-day delivery. The “Walmart to Go” service allows customers in a handful of markets to buy and receive items on the same day for $10. Inventory is limited to popular items, including toys, electronics, sporting goods and other gifts. The service is in Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, the San Jose-San Francisco Bay Area and Denver.

Walmart will be offering same-day delivery until Dec. 23, but will be closed on Dec. 24 and 25. It will resume on Dec. 26.

There are smaller alternatives, too.

For example, TaskRabbit is a marketplace where you can find people who are willing to complete small projects or services for a fee. The service operates in a number of major markets around the country, and due to its independent nature, a spokesman claims, “The Web site and iPhone app are never closed.”

In fact, once a “rabbit” has received a background check and activated, “they can work when they want, and not when they don’t.” Popular tasks this month include holiday shopping, which is averaging $57; gift wrapping, $38; and hanging lights, $85. If that sounds exorbitant, remember that consumers should expect to pay a premium on holidays.

Finally, another service in San Francisco is Postmates, which is offering same-day delivery by dispatching a nearby courier to run an errand. A spokeswoman confirmed that it is operating on Christmas Eve from 8 am to 6 pm, and on Christmas Day from 11 am to midnight.

Additionally, as part of the iPhone app, Postmates is creating a shopping guide that lists major retailers where last-minute purchases can be made, including the likes of Apple, Tiffany, Uniqlo and Nordstrom.

While there seem to be a lot of last-minute options, Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said that this year is no different from other years in at least one sense. Retailers, and especially e-commerce companies, are always trying to push the limits when it comes to how late orders can be placed.

“It does drive a spike in sales as you approach the shipping deadline. I’d estimate a 20 percent lift on that day over an average holiday day, but by no means would it eclipse the Thanksgiving weekend or Cyber Monday,” she said.

Of course, if you miss all of these options, there are always gift cards. And there’s still the local mall.

But there are signs that the freeze between the two companies is starting to thaw. Over the past couple of weeks, Amazon’s Kindle devices have started appearing in search results on Google Shopping. While that may not sound very significant, it means that Amazon realized it could no longer afford to ignore the search engine — even if it means it has to pay.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on the Kindle’s sudden appearance in Google Shopping, and a Google spokesperson also had nothing to say.

When Google first announced it was rolling out Google Shopping earlier this year, it promised a better shopping experience on Google. While the program has been fairly under the radar, it represents a huge shift for the search engine, which used to accept product feeds for free. For the most part, the change has gone smoothly, with many retailers reporting positive results and few complaints by consumers (the one exception is Microsoft’s Bing, which has plenty to say).

However, early on, Google came under fire for not delivering the best experience, as promised. Most notably, since Amazon was refusing to participate, it eliminated many products from results, including the Kindle. For example, SearchEngineLand reported in early November that Google’s results were less than stellar when searching for the Kindle Fire. While several online merchants and brick-and-mortar stores showed up as selling the device, shoppers could not see Amazon as an option. It would be like buying an iPad from another retailer without first checking prices on Apple.com.

But starting sometime a couple of weeks ago, that was no longer the case. Today, Amazon is showing up in the results for the Kindle on Google Shopping. Sources say that Amazon is paying to participate, rather than this being a move by Google to include the Kindle for the sake of having more complete listings. Amazon is not otherwise participating on Google Shopping, although some of its subsidiaries are, such as Zappos and Diapers.com.

For most shoppers, the Google-Amazon rivalry is easy to miss — one company is a search engine and the other is an e-commerce site. But this holiday season, it’s in full swing, with most consumers starting their online shopping experience at one of the two sites. According to Forrester, 30 percent of online shoppers went directly to Amazon, compared with 13 percent of shoppers who went to Google first. This year, Google is seeing a huge lift after revamping its shopping experience. In addition to starting to charge retailers for inclusion, it created a more visual experience, including product images. It also allows consumers to easily conduct price comparisons across numerous sites.

Google’s efforts are already paying off, according to Eric Best, the CEO of Mercent, which provides retailers with tools to help them compete on Amazon and Google. He said across Mercent’s customer base, which includes 1-800-Flowers, REI and Office Depot, transactions this holiday season are up 60 percent year over year on Google and 37 percent on Amazon.

“Google is growing so much faster in its conversion to paid than we were expecting or we would have hoped,” he said. “I think Google is working hard to recover some ground against Amazon with these moves. After all, how defensible is search if you don’t own commerce?”

Why is this happening now? Smartphones, which will make up nearly half of mobile phones in the U.S. by the end of 2012, enable “app-cessories” like the larklife or the Fitbit to do a lot with a little: The phone provides processing power, display and cloud connectivity. Smartphones like the iPhone 5 and many Android phones, as well as all Windows 8 devices, have native support for low-energy Bluetooth (they’re “Bluetooth Smart Ready”), which allows sensor-laden devices to transmit data to the phone using very little battery. It’s not just the hardware that’s evolving, it’s also the software: Programmers are getting more sophisticated at creating algorithms that interpret the sensor-collected data and deliver advice. For example, start-ups Lark Technologies, Live!y, and Wallet.AI all consult with cognitive science experts to create products that will actually change people’s behavior.

Consumers seem receptive when there’s a clear benefit that they get in exchange for their data. Progressive Casualty Insurance, for example, has more than a million users of its Snapshot device, which tracks real-time driving behavior (acceleration, breaking, mileage, time of day) and adjusts consumers’ auto insurance policies based on their actual risk; on average, users save $150 per year on their policies, according to the company. BodyMedia reports that its Fit armbands, which track 5,000 data points per minute via four sensors, have an average length of use of six months and climbing, and are used not only for losing weight but also for managing chronic diseases like diabetes.

Moving sensor-laden devices from niche to mainstream requires solving data-related problems, such as unlocking and sharing data from multiple sources, including hard-to-get data from healthcare providers. Products also need to improve data reliability: For example, Nike+ FuelBand users have noted that they get more “fuel” points for arm-intensive (but not fitness-inducing) activities such as eating pizza than they do for walking up a flight of stairs. Add to that the privacy and security challenges of managing personal data. Putting users in control of their own data will be a key success factor for any Smart Body, Smart World product. Consumers may enjoy sharing their activities with their social networks (or subsets of their social networks) some of the time, but also will want modes that act more like private journals than public broadcasts.

Smart Body, Smart World products will reorder the value chain of consumer electronics. The primary beneficiaries will be the algorithm owners; hardware design is important, but the core IP is in the algorithms that interpret the sensor-collected data and deliver advice. The platform owners, namely Apple and Google, will be the secondary beneficiaries; Google is developing first-party hardware (Google Glass and, reportedly, an Android smartwatch) while Apple is cultivating an ecosystem of apps and accessories. Carriers will accrue value through increased use of smartphones via sensor-laden accessories, and to a lesser extent via standalone device connections. Retailers also stand to benefit from smart product growth — but not traditional consumer electronics retailers. Sensor-laden baby mattresses would be an easier sell at Diapers.com or your local baby goods store than at Best Buy — consumers will look for these devices at the retailers that solve the greater lifestyle challenge, not the retailers that specialize in electronics.

It’s hard to overstate how different out lives will be when the Smart Body, Smart World paradigm is in full force. For consumers, the effects are likely to be both positive and negative: With more information and guidance, humans can make more “rational” decisions, but if we are always listening to our devices, we may experience less spontaneity, too. And what happens to our nervous systems when devices surround us, even when we sleep? Those questions are beyond the purview of the type of strategy research we do at Forrester, but answering them will be crucial to living in a Smart Body, Smart World paradigm.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals at Forrester Research. To learn more about this research, visit the full report here.

Wait, really?

Well, it’s a matter of perception. This was a Forrester survey, and people were asked how much time they spend using the Internet. On average, they said 19.6 hours per week, versus 21.9 hours per week when asked the same question in 2011.

But Forrester thinks that the drop is more about perception than reality, because many people are virtually always online these days.

“Despite the fact that they always have connected devices and are always online, they don’t really realize they’re online,” said Forrester analyst Gina Sverdlov. “They’re using Google Maps or checking in on Facebook, but that’s not considered online because it has become such a part of everyday life.”

When Forrester separately does tracking studies to measure how much time people spend online, it’s way more than they realize, she said. But this particular study was a survey of 58,000 U.S. online adults, who were asked to talk about their own habits.

It makes sense. Why talk or think about “going online” when you’re already there?

Sverdlov said she sees this difference between how people talk about the Internet and what they actually do in other areas, too.

So, for instance, the Forrester survey found that lots of people say they visit social networking sites regularly: 70 percent this year versus 58 percent in 2010.

Meanwhile, other activities like using photo-sharing sites and contributing to online forums and discussion groups saw drops in reported usage.

People still post photos and talk to each other online all the time, Sverdlov said, but they may think of them differently because they may be doing them on services like Facebook and Twitter. “We’re seeing somewhat of a cannibalization of other Internet activities because it’s possible to do all that on social networking sites,” she said.

What we actually do is generally more important than the words we use to describe it — but the fact that these labels are trailing behind is another indicator of the significance of these shifts.

Earlier this year, Sprint was poised to acquire MetroPCS, but the company’s board of directors balked at the deal at the last minute. Though fully negotiated, the board opted to walk away, rather than sign. So Sprint forfeited its chance to claim MetroPCS’s spectrum and 9.3 million customers.

Why? That’s not entirely clear. Sprint’s stock was off, and had been for years. There may have been concerns about execution and, more broadly, the company’s overall strategy. Regardless of the reason, the end result was the same: Sprint lost out on a compelling opportunity. Had it snapped up MetroPCS, not only would it have gained that spectrum and the millions of customers I mentioned earlier, it would have significantly raised its profile in the wireless sector. Remember, MetroPCS customers were already roaming onto Sprint’s network, because it, too, uses the CDMA standard. Integration would have been relatively easy. Presumably, that’s why Sprint spent months negotiating to acquire MetroPCS.

So, now that MetroPCS is off the table, what’s Sprint’s next move? There are two potential tacks here. The first, as Forrester analyst Charles Golvin explains it, is simply to stay its current course.

“Sprint needs to stick to its knitting: Get Network Vision finished, put the iDEN network to bed, maintain the aggressive pace of their LTE buildout, ride herd on Clearwire’s TD-LTE deployment, and maintain the marketing focus on its differentiated unlimited offer,” Golvin told AllThingsD. “If they succeed in those efforts, they’ll maintain their significant lead on T-Mobile/MetroPCS — or whatever the new company will be called.”

Golvin’s overarching point: Sprint should focus on Verizon and AT&T as its competition, not T-Mobile.

But there’s one other potential move here: Take a run at T-Mobile and acquire it before it’s too late. And that’s what BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk is looking for. “At this point, it might make more sense for Sprint to consider purchasing T-Mobile USA,” Piecyk theorizes. “A T-Mobile deal would give the company much more scale and would materially increase the scarcity value of Sprint to Charlie Ergen’s Dish, which is looking for a wireless partner.”

An interesting theory. Clearly, Sprint would do well to stick to its knitting, as Golvin suggests. But in order to more aggressively compete with AT&T and Verizon, it might want to bulk up by taking out T-Mobile, as well.

Tablets, smartphones and future devices like wearables are tools of a new era of post-PC productivity. The best productivity apps for these devices invent ways to be productive using limited input — that is, enabling input through touch, voice, cameras, sensors and other native capabilities of the device. For example, with Adobe’s Proto tablet app, users can design real wireframes in seconds by drawing shapes with a fingertip (e.g., drawing a triangle is a placeholder for a video asset) — it doesn’t require typing or precise designed-for-mouse menu navigation.

Combining the native capabilities of post-PC devices with cloud connectivity yields powerful new productivity scenarios that weren’t available in the PC era, such as:

• On-screen, in-person presentations. With a laptop, the screen is a wall that divides participants; tablets enable participants to share a screen, and their lightweight, instant-on form factor makes spontaneous presentations possible in hallways or trade show floors — not just conference rooms. Pharmaceutical sales reps often use SlideShark on the iPad for one-on-one hallway presentations with doctors; they can send doctors the presentation as a leave-behind, which cuts the cost of paper collateral and also includes tracking and reporting features.
• Scanning, processing and sharing from a single, portable device. The combination of a high-quality camera combined with the ability to annotate and share documents condenses document workflow. Bill Taylor, a product manager overseeing the PaperPort product at Nuance Communications, describes one such scenario: “We see lawyers sitting at the table next to a client, reviewing and marking up a document with the client, and having the client initial it right there. Instead of printing out the document and sticking it in a paralegal’s bin, he shares it through the cloud to a business partner who sends it back, accomplishing twice the work in half the time.”
• Remote, anywhere document access, editing and sync. While a higher percentage of PC workers compared with tablet workers use word processing and spreadsheet applications, usage is still high for both of these applications on tablets: 60 percent and 53 percent, respectively, even though the most popular editing software, Microsoft Office, is not yet available as a native app on iPad or Android tablets. That gap has created a business opportunity ($30 million in revenue in 2011) for Quickoffice (recently acquired by Google), whose products allow users to remotely access, search, edit, sync and share documents across devices, platforms and cloud services.
• Multimodal note-taking, ideation and mind-mapping. Note-taking and ideation are not new, but post-PC devices enhance these activities with dimensions they didn’t have on the PC. Evernote’s 30 million users take notes using multiple input modes, including text, voice, images from the camera, screen shots, location services, files and third-party data from other apps such as LinkedIn.

Post-PC devices — via their app stores — also mark a shift in the way productivity software is distributed and monetized. Selling directly to end users via app stores requires different strengths than selling to the enterprise or selling to retail stores where consumers bought software in the PC era — and it levels the playing field for small developers to compete. “Apple’s App Store has turned software development into a global cottage industry — there has never been a time in history when one person could build and distribute a product globally,” says Craig Scott, CEO of iThoughts. Andrew Sinkov, VP of marketing for Evernote, puts it this way: “Thank God app stores exist.” When Evernote started in 2008 on Mac, Windows and Windows Mobile, “It was almost impossible to download an app.” Now, he says, 80 percent of new users come through mobile app stores.

While app stores are a boon to start-ups, they disrupt the pecking order for established software companies. Jill Soley, group product manager of Adobe’s Creative Cloud and suite of touch apps, recognizes the threat from post-PC competitors: “If mature companies don’t recognize that the world is changing and change with it, you won’t last long.” Upstarts such as iThoughts anticipate that competition will bring prices down. “A lot of companies are going to have to adjust to software getting cheaper,” says CEO Craig Scott, noting that Mindjet, the leading mind-mapping software for the PC, is $300, while the iThoughts app is $10.

We’ve seen this pattern of digital disruption before, most notably in the media industries. Now software faces its disruptive moment. We expect to see new competitors steal share from PC-era giants. New power players will emerge, especially those like Box and Salesforce that create an ecosystem of apps that work together. And we expect great outcomes for workers, as software companies invent new ways for us to be productive in the post-PC era.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst serving consumer product strategy professionals at Forrester Research. Follow her on Twitter @srepps. To learn more about this research, visit the full wearables research report here.

The survey was fielded in Q4 2011 by Forrester Research’s Strategic Planning Forrsights.

Chart/data courtesy of Forrester Research

Currently, 37 percent of all adults online in the United States today qualify, and it is probably no huge surprise that the greatest concentration occurs among what Forrester terms Generation Y and Generation Z, those between the ages of 18 and 31. But one of the more interesting tidbits here (besides the fact that Forrester describes those between 46 and 55 as “Young Boomers”) is that Generation X will be mostly Addressable by the end of the year — an increase of more than 6 percent.

Chart/data courtesy of Forrester Research

Wearables have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media. Imagine videogames that happen in real space. Or glasses that remind you of a colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone. Wearables will transform our lives in numerous ways, trivial and substantial, that we are just starting to imagine.

So what will it take to elevate these accessories from niche to mainstream? Hardware advances in battery life and the way sensors interact with each other will get us further than we are today, but the software platforms that drive the hardware hold the key to consumer adoption. In the same way that Windows took the PC mainstream and iOS and Android are powering the smartphone revolution today, wearables’ success depends on backing from one or more of the big five software platforms — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. These platforms — and their developer communities — hold the key to the consumer connection. How so?

Apple has the most polished marketing, channel and brand. More than any other company, Apple has the potential to make any product go mainstream (witness the iPad). Apple’s expertise in hardware manufacturing, its developer network, its marketing prowess and its channel strength in Apple Stores and partner retailers all add up to a fertile petri dish for wearables. Already, Apple has inspired a number of “app-cessories” built to sync with iOS devices, like the Lark sleep sensor wristband and the (now discontinued) Jawbone UP fitness wristband.

Google has an open platform and a license to dabble. Google’s Android is the platform of choice for WIMM Labs, the Sony SmartWatch and others because it’s open: Product strategists can build whatever products they want on top of Google’s code while still taking advantage of the growing number of developers and companies that build Android apps. Additionally, Google has crucial elements of search infrastructure, with the ability to recognize and retrieve vast amounts of information like location-based data, which could be the basis for many wearable device features.

Microsoft has the best depth sensor yet. Windows Embedded, Microsoft’s operating systems and related solutions for “intelligent systems,” powers a wide range of products from Ford’s Sync automobile information system to Polycom conference phones. But to date, these solutions have been geared more for enterprise use, and haven’t attracted the same breadth of professional and amateur developers that iOS and Android platforms have — a crucial component for taking wearables mainstream. But another Microsoft product, the Kinect for Xbox 360, has captured developers’ imaginations, prompting a Kinect application programming interface for Windows. The potential of a Microsoft powered wearable becomes much more tangible when you imagine the depth sensor of the Kinect turned outward from your body, toward the world rather than toward you.

Amazon has information on more than 100 million products and their buyers. More and more consumers are starting their product searches with Amazon. Its all-encompassing product catalog, detailed product specs and reviews and personalized recommendations would all be assets in wearables. But despite Amazon’s success in manufacturing the Kindle line, we think it’s more likely that Amazon’s wearables strategy will center on distributing apps for other companies’ devices, rather than manufacturing the device itself.

Facebook has a Rolodex — and facial recognition — for 800 million people. Facebook, like Amazon, has the tool kit to be a partner player in the wearables market. Facebook is controversially implementing facial recognition software to autotag photos from its 800 million users — software that would be a perfect fit with a wearable device. Like that guy on the train? Sorry, he’s “in a relationship.”

In three years, we believe wearables will matter to every product strategist, just as mobile and tablets matter today. And because the software platforms are the key to mainstream, these devices have the power to intensify the platform wars among the big five — over issues like talent, intellectual property and patents, developers and customers. Wearables will shift toward mainstream in three phases:

• Phase one: Apple grows the app-cessory market with a deeper investment in wearables. For instance, by adding more sensors and connectivity to the iPod nano, as well as Siri voice control, Apple could immediately spark innovation in iOS apps and more accessories for nano beyond its existing watchbands.
• Phase two: Google broadens wearable experimentation with its open platform. Our call that Google will dominate in wearables — at least in the short term — may be surprising given our skepticism about Android’s prospects on tablets in the past. But an open platform for experimentation is exactly what wearables will need to evolve out of the early stages.
• Phase three: Microsoft competes with an “anti-platform” platform. With Windows 8, Microsoft is pivoting away from .NET/Silverlight to the open Web protocols of HTML5 and Javascript. This shift will be a strength for Microsoft to build on, promoting a future OS for wearables as a more flexible, scalable platform for developers than iOS or Android.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst serving consumer product strategy professionals at Forrester Research. Follow her on Twitter @srepps. To learn more about this research, visit the full wearables research report here.

But in the process, companies are making a lot of the same mistakes — from not researching ahead of time how workers can best use the devices, to underestimating the costs and the additional challenges tablets present for IT networks.

Here’s a rundown of five of the biggest mistakes, and what companies have learned from them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But Apple is still a consumer-focused personal computer company, and one trend I like to revisit is how Apple continues to grow its presence in business and professional settings.

Here’s a pretty good indicator: If you’re in the business of designing things like machines or buildings, there’s a chance you’re using software from Autodesk. Its latest mechanical design software, called Inventor Fusion, is used by mechanical engineers to design cars and planes and factory assembly lines. It’s heavy-duty software that’s currently available on Windows. A new trial version for the Mac has just recently come out is coming out soon.

While engineering software like this tended to be run on beefed-up Windows workstations during the last decade, the Mac has started to make serious inroads among engineers and designers, especially the younger ones, says Autodesk product manager Kevin Schneider. “The younger generation of engineers has grown up with computing expectations that are completely different,” he says. They used Macs at school, probably learned to edit photos and video in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, so when they start using CAD and other software, naturally, they want it running on a Mac, too.

Autodesk makes four applications available on Apple’s App Store, and the results are pretty stunning. Those applications — Autocad LT, Autocad WS, Motion FX and Sketchbook Pro — have clocked up 2.2 million downloads via the App Store. That’s a lot for any software, and it’s a heck of a lot when you consider that these applications don’t come for free. Sketchbook Pro goes for $59.99; Autocad LT costs $899.99.

The number is even more impressive when you consider that Autodesk apps account for about 2 percent of total downloads on the App Store. Late last year, Apple announced that its store had broken the 100-million-download mark, generating 100,000 downloads a day, and making it the biggest software download site in the world.

It’s just another indication that the Mac is still making inroads against Windows in the workplace. A new Forrester Research survey of 3,350 IT decision makers finds that 46 percent of all firms in North America and Europe issued Macs to their employees in 2011; that figure was up by more than half since 2009.

Motive

As the saying goes, people are motivated by either greed or fear. I think for many big companies, it’s more the latter. And Microsoft has a lot to be scared about.

If you poke behind its $71 billion in revenue and 39 percent operating margins, 30 percent of the goldmine comes from multiyear volume licensing agreements, which Microsoft calls Enterprise Agreements (EAs). According to industry analyst firm Forrester Research, “these profitable agreements bring in the kind of regular revenue preferred by financial-market analysts that monitor Microsoft’s performance.”

What motivates a customer to sign up for an Enterprise Agreement instead of simply buying Microsoft products, like Office, off the shelf? Well, historically, Microsoft pitched EAs as a way to ensure you can cover your workforce with Microsoft products at a discounted price level.

With companies investing in post-PC devices like smartphones and tablets, and evaluating alternatives to Microsoft productivity solutions, such as Google Apps or Salesforce.com, CIOs are starting to wonder whether renewing their EA is still a top priority.

In response to this threat, Microsoft is now pushing its Software Assurance (SA) licensing model, which allows customers to upgrade to newer products and also use its cloud services. The reason for the possible shift, Forrester says, is that “the twin revolutions of client mobility and cloud servers will kill device-based licensing, which is Microsoft’s existing model.”

So if Microsoft doesn’t embrace the cloud in a big way, the EA gravy train could come to an end.

Means

Apple is cool. Facebook is friendly. And Google isn’t evil. Yet look across a sea of computers in a typical company, and you’ll still see Microsoft everywhere.

And I’m not just talking about Windows. Microsoft has two key assets that will help it win the enterprise cloud:

• Office: While the Web and Web-based apps are fabulous for consuming content and even collaborating around it, Microsoft Office is still the standard in productivity to create corporate content. Love or hate those PowerPoint presentations, but they are still how most companies run. And for flexible analysis, Excel is unmatched. Heck, the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (which is primarily Office for Mac) is a $350 million business on its own.
• Outlook/Exchange: For many workers, Microsoft Outlook (with Microsoft Exchange Server on the backend) is the first thing they boot up to start their workday, and the program they remain in all day long. According to industry analyst firm Radicati, 301 million corporate mailboxes used Outlook in 2010. Indeed, some companies have switched from Microsoft Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps and back, because users are too addicted to the interface and functionality of Microsoft Outlook.

So Microsoft still owns two of the key ways “knowledge workers” work with knowledge.

Opportunity

Microsoft isn’t working from a standing start. It actually jumped into the cloud relatively early in 2008 with its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a hosted platform for collaboration. While BPOS suffered from many challenges, mainly because it was based on a platform that wasn’t designed for the cloud, Microsoft made it clear several years ago that they are “all in” as a company in the cloud.

This year, after many delays and much anticipation, Microsoft finally announced its first platform built for the cloud, Office 365. The new version of Exchange is finally on par with its on-premise alternative. Microsoft SharePoint Online is now flexible enough to meet many enterprise use cases. And Microsoft Lync Online, a real-time chat and videoconferencing system, could be a game changer for company productivity.

In parallel, Microsoft is working away on Windows 8, its big bet on the tablet revolution. With all of Microsoft’s failed past attempts at mobility and tablets, some level of cynicism is expected. But some believe Microsoft’s conviction is real. If Microsoft even gets it 80 percent right on tablets, they will likely win in enterprises that are used to the manageability of Windows, and will be attracted to the inevitably deeper Office integration.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong: The innovation in the cloud is coming from all over, mainly from start-ups. For many of these start-ups and other non-enterprise organizations, a non-Microsoft approach will likely be the winner. But for the millions of you working in corporate America, Microsoft is probably the one bringing the cloud to a desktop near you.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

Product strategists in the PC industry are gearing up for 2012 to be the year of the “ultrabook” — very thin, very light laptops, usually with solid-state drives (SSD), that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air — such as the Asus Zenbook and Lenovo U300s. We agree that ultrabooks’ lighter, thinner form will appeal to many consumers. Already, 21 percent of U.S. online consumers say they’re interested in owning one, according to a Forrester Research survey fielded in September. But we see the ultrabook as an evolution of the laptop rather than an entirely new form factor. So what is the next big thing in consumer computing?

The “next big thing” is likely to be many things — we anticipate accelerating form factor diversification beyond the desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones we have today, as we advance deeper into the Post-PC Era. Based on what we see in research and development labs, new products beginning to come to market and gaps in consumer computing experiences, we’ve identified these five form factors as the best candidates for what comes next:

• Wearables: Wearable devices, or “wearables” for short, are devices worn on or near the body that sense and relay information. Many wearables, like the heads-up display (HUD) contact lenses in development at the University of Washington, are years from marketability. But other wearables are already available as consumer products, for uses such as communication and health and fitness. An increasing number of wearables in the health-and-fitness space interact with Apple iOS devices, such as the Lark Technologies vibrating wristband that doubles as an alarm clock and a sleep sensor; and BodyMedia FIT Armbands, which have four sensors to track activity, sleep and calorie intake. WIMM Labs, a Foxconn-funded start-up in Los Altos, Calif., has designed multifunctional wearables, based on Google’s Android software, that it will license to other companies.
• Embedded devices: We define embedded devices as physical objects that incorporate computing processors and sensors, excluding those worn on the body, which we classify as wearables. Like wearables, embedded devices are diverse in form, ranging from devices such as Livescribe smartpens that fit into your pocket, to LG Thinq refrigerators that sit in your kitchen. Embedded devices may or may not have a display — Livescribe pens don’t; the LG Thinq appliances do. Today, embedded devices are widely used in industrial automation and automotives, and they have emerging consumer uses in home automation, entertainment and productivity.
• Surfaces: Surfaces are large interactive displays, which may incorporate multitouch, voice and gesture control, facial recognition, near field communication (NFC), quick response (QR) codes or other input/output mechanisms. Today, surfaces are found mostly in public places such as hotels (Microsoft Surface tables in Sheraton bars) and conferences and events (Obscura Digital’s custom multitouch video installations), as well as in education (interactive whiteboards) and news media (red state/blue state maps), but we see potential for additional uses, especially in retail and marketing. For example, retailers such as Victoria’s Secret have commissioned the design firm frog design to create interactive displays for their retail stores. In Seoul, South Korea, retailers use surfaces to extend their reach beyond their stores: Tesco Homeplus, the No. 2 grocery retailer in South Korea, built “virtual malls” in subway stations to reach more customers without building more stores. Commuters take pictures of QR codes under the groceries they want to buy, and the groceries are delivered to their homes.
• Flexible displays: Flexible displays are computing screens that can be rolled, folded or flexed. Flexible devices can take the form of personal devices, such as an e-reader, or larger surface displays, such as furniture or wallpaper. Flexible displays are likely the farthest from becoming commercialized products because of the lack of a defined use case or customer: Polymer Vision, a spinoff of Philips Electronics, promoted its flexible eBook Reader for years, but declared bankruptcy before bringing the device to market. HP has been developing printable Mylar displays that it imagines could be used for candy wrappers, armband computers for the military or living room wallpaper, but the displays are still several years from commercialization.
• Miniprojectors: Miniprojectors are small devices that project a larger image onto another surface or, in the case of holographic projection, into 3-D space. Miniprojectors can be combined with cameras that recognize gesture to become interactive, similar to the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360. Today, miniprojectors such as the Brookstone Pocket Projector are gaining in popularity as iPhone accessories. But they’re still niche products, as consumers must purchase them separately. Apple has already filed a patent to embed interactive projectors into its iPhones, iPads and Macs. Embedded miniprojectors would appeal primarily to information workers, but there could be broader consumer uses as well, such as impromptu photo slide shows or YouTube viewing in a group.

It’s easy to read about computing wallpaper, or contact lenses with embedded heads-up displays, and think that these form factors have no bearing on what product strategists are doing today. But product strategists who see what’s coming can anticipate disruption — or even innovate and become disruptors themselves. As you think about what’s coming in 2012 and beyond, know that none of these devices will operate in isolation. The most successful products will work with other products — for example, wearables that talk to smartphones and TVs; surfaces that are activated by the presence of your smartphone. We’re living in a multidevice, multiconnection world, and the best experiences will be those that work across devices and platforms. In that sense, the next phase of the Post-PC Era doesn’t look so different from today.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, serving consumer product strategy professionals. Follow her on Twitter at @srepps

Prime is so crucial to the Seattle-based company that it is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the program, by some analysts’ estimates. Until this year, Prime offered only quick shipping for $79 a year. But the online retailer has added services to Prime while keeping the price unchanged as a means of keeping customers loyal to Amazon’s more-profitable operations.

The cost of Prime underscores the willingness of Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos to shell out money as he continues the company’s transition from an online retailer of paper books, to an Internet megamall that sells an array of products from various companies, to a seller of digital goods and even its own devices, such as the Kindle Fire tablet computer. Forrester Research estimated that about five million Fires, which begins shipping Tuesday, will be sold by the end of January. Amazon declined to reveal the Fire’s sales.

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New research was released today by Forrester on Groupon’s second day of trading on the public markets. In midday trading, the daily deals giant was down 17 cents, or less than a percentage point, to $25.94.

In the report, Forrester’s biggest dig on the space is that it has created “deal-hunting gremlins,” who are getting a discount on services they would normally be willing to pay full price for. Additionally, analyst Sucharita Mulpuru finds that the daily email model is expensive to scale and that consumers will ultimately unsubscribe as offers fill up their inboxes.

Other findings:

• 29 percent of subscribers of coupon and flash sales sites have unsubscribed because they don’t want to receive so many emails
• 49 percent don’t sign up because they don’t want to receive more email
• 83 percent receive emails from Groupon
• 41 percent receive emails from LivingSocial
• 26 percent of subscribers have purchased more than four offers.
• 36 percent have never made a purchase.

The survey was conducted from June 11 to 21 and had a total of 9,449 respondents.

(Image courtesy of Groupon’s Flickr page.)

For instance: Did you know that lots and lots and lots of people are pining away for a tablet that runs Windows?

Here’s a new survey out from Boston Consulting Group, which says 42 percent of U.S. consumers would like to buy a tablet that runs Microsoft’s operating system. That makes it the most desired OS by a significant margin, trailed by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

So that’s a little odd, right? Because on the Internet, everyone loves Apple. And also, because there is no Windows tablet.*

But the BCG study isn’t an anomaly. Forrester conducted a poll earlier this year and got the same message, with an even starker gap between Microsoft and everyone else: “Only 9% of consumers considering buying a tablet actively prefer an Android tablet — compared with 16% who prefer iOS and 46% who prefer Windows.”

When I wrote about it back in August, I found this so puzzling that I got Forrester researcher Sarah Rotman Epps on the phone to confirm that this wasn’t some weird typo. Nope, she told me.

And it’s sort of common sense: “When we survey consumers, it becomes very clear that Windows is still a very popular brand,” she said. Apple has sold tens of millions of iPads, but Microsoft has sold more than 400 million Windows 7 devices. What that says to me is that there’s a huge opportunity that Microsoft has left untapped so far.

So, what do you think, Steve Ballmer? I know you folks will be preoccupied today with a slew of Xbox announcements. But maybe when you’re done, you can give the people what they want.

*I know, I know — there are Windows tablets. But there aren’t practical, consumer-focused iPad-like tablets running Windows on the market now. Though one day there might be. Okay?

That discovery is making retailers focus on tablets ahead of the all-important holiday season, as the tough economic backdrop puts a premium on what the industry calls “conversion” — making sure the shoppers who show up actually buy something.

Tablets still account for only a small percentage of overall e-commerce, but they are punching above their weight. While the conversion rate — orders divided by total visits — is three percent for shoppers using a traditional PC, it is four or five percent for shoppers using tablets, says Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research.

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With the adoption of smartphones and tablets, many retailers are scrambling to understand what e-commerce looks like on the mobile device. As it evolves, increasingly it’s looking like the bigger opportunity might be on tablets — not the phone.

Today, Google released Google Catalogs, a free iPad app that enables shoppers to browse — in an electronic form –the familiar glossy print publications that come in the mail. It launched the app with dozens of the most popular catalogs, including Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, L.L. Bean, Lands’ End and others. An Android version is expected soon.

Google Catalogs product manager Abigail Holtz said Google has built other shopping experiences for the Web that are all about search, but this time it was looking to build something users would browse, like window-shopping in a mall.

“We asked how do we create the inspirational browse-shopping experience, and we thought about whether it makes sense on the Web, but the platform that it is most poised for it is the tablet,” Holtz said.

A Forrester Research report titled “Why Tablet Commerce May Soon Trump Mobile Commerce” found in a survey among retailers that on average 21 percent of their mobile traffic comes from tablets, with several reporting figures north of 50 percent.

Separately, we’ve reported that various retailers had expected revenues from all mobile devices to hit about 10 percent of overall sales by the end of the first quarter, and that later this year, that figure could inch even higher, as more tablets and smartphones get into the hands of more consumers.

Google Catalogs is a single application that provides access to dozens of catalogs. From the homepage, it provides a number of categories: Women’s fashion, jewelry, beauty, home, men’s fashion, kids and gifts. Once you drill into each one, you have the option of seeing dozens of specific catalog titles displayed with their most recent edition.

Because the pages are digital, you can zoom in to see products up close, tap on images of price tags to learn more about the item, or even search for the product in nearby stores. Some retailers have also integrated videos and other digital content.

For instance, in the Williams-Sonoma catalog, one of the listings is for a Cuisinart product that cooks and blends soup in one device that costs $365. The blender ad also links to a four-minute video of a woman demonstrating how to use the blender to make smoky lentil soup.

“It adds a richness to the shopping experience that is really engaging for consumers,” Holtz said. “As I’m flipping through, it’s different from a catalog. You can go deeper.”

From a product page, users can either find the item in a store or buy it on the retailer’s Web site. The app does not handle any of the payment processing, and Google does not charge any of its partners referral fees.

The app is very similar to two other catalogs also available in the iPad App Store. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Padopolis launched Catalog Spree in April and TheFind launched Catalogue in May. Both of the companies have some of the same catalogs as Google and are charging retailers affiliate fees for purchases made on their sites.

Holtz said Google doesn’t have plans to start charging, although it is a possibility in the future. There’s also a chance it could monetize the app in other ways, she said, but declined to be more specific.

Here lies the challenge of Research In Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smartphones and now, the PlayBook tablet: To conquer the enterprise–which has historically been RIM’s stronghold because of its White House-level security and lack of competition–it needs to sell tablets to consumers.

This isn’t impossible. Apple has had remarkable success selling the iPad to consumers and businesses. In a Forrester survey of U.S. consumers conducted in January 2011, 34 percent of iPad owners reported using their device at work. With enhanced security and dedicated support (“business specialists” at Apple Stores), we’ll see more companies join Mercedes-Benz and GE in buying iPads directly for their employees. But Apple’s success has come precisely because it puts consumers first. A typical statement we hear from executives at firms considering buying tablets is, “We’d really like a tablet that integrates better with our back-end systems, but we’re going with iPads because we want employees to like them.” Businesses care about how workers feel about technology.

Contrary to popular belief, RIM is pretty successful selling its devices to consumers, too. BlackBerry smartphone shipments, subscribers, and revenues continue to rise quarter after quarter, even in mature North American markets. Most important, BlackBerry consumer customers (“BlackBerry Internet Service,” or BIS) now outnumber BlackBerry enterprise customers (“BlackBerry Enterprise Service,” or BES).

But the PlayBook is a complicated product to sell to consumers. For starters, the “BlackBerry Bridge” feature, which displays email and BlackBerry messenger content only when in Bluetooth-range of a BlackBerry smartphone, has security appeal for CIOs but is potentially confusing to consumers. Yes, you can still get Web-based email like Gmail on the device, but there’s no native email application like there is on the iPad—and email is the No. 1 activity consumers do on tablets today. Second, compared with the iPad the PlayBook has relatively few native apps designed for the platform; it supports Android apps but only those designed for Gingerbread, not Honeycomb (not that there are many of those, either). Apps don’t matter to all tablet shoppers, but they do matter to some: 23 percent of consumers considering buying a tablet rank “Number of available apps” in their top-three criteria; 19 percent say the same about Flash support, which the PlayBook browser will have.

Whereas Apple owns its own channel–the Apple Store–to educate and sell the iPad to consumers, RIM will be relying on the Blue Shirts at Best Buy to sell its device, as well as its carrier partners and other local retailers (20,000 stores worldwide). It’s going to be a tough sell. While the PlayBook has dazzling performance and multitasking—for example, the ability to switch apps and keep a video or game running in the background—and solid hardware design, consumers will be comparing a first-generation PlayBook with a second-generation iPad. iPad will dominate tablet sales in 2011. But this is a marathon, not a sprint, and we see a path for RIM to gain market share in 2012. An improved version-two PlayBook must have native email, built-in security and more native apps for QNX, the RIM’s recently-acquired operating system for the PlayBook. To get there, RIM will need to port QNX to its smartphones to expand the platform’s reach and make it more appealing for developers.

Even so, the PlayBook’s appeal is likely limited to BlackBerry smartphone customers, and to win them over, RIM’s marketing execution needs to be flawless. With the recent departure of CMO Keith Pardy, RIM’s new leadership needs to step up and define and execute a vision for this product that puts consumers on par if not ahead of CIOs. Without that vision, RIM will have an expensive product failure on its hands.

Ted Schadler is a vice president and principal analyst and Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

In a new report out on Tuesday, analyst Sucharita Mulpuru forecasts online sales in the U.S. in November and December will increase 16 percent over last year, reaching $52 billion. Retail sales as a whole are likely to increase just 2.3 percent, according to the National Retail Federation.

Last month, eMarketer analyst Jeffrey Grau similarly forecast that holiday sales would increase 14 percent.

Why is e-commerce continuing to chip away at old-fashioned retail? Online shopping is still winning a few new converts, but those are few and far between, says Mulpuru. Rather, online retailers like Amazon.com are convincing existing customers to try out buying new things online–so people who might have started out just buying books online 10 years ago today have since also become ok with the idea of buying shoes or diapers online, too. “People become evangelized to the channel when they start shopping in a couple of categories,” says Mulpuru.

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The U.S. government next year will begin to dole out billions of dollars to health-care providers who adopt electronic medical records. Doctors also face a federal mandate to upgrade software as the U.S. switches to a new system of insurance billing codes.

For Indian companies with experience in software outsourcing, the flurry of health-related tech spending in the U.S. is “like another Y2K opportunity,” says Pradep Nair, head of the health-care practice at New Delhi’s HCL Technologies Ltd., referring to the turn-of-the-millennium computer glitch that provided work for Indian tech firms.

But cashing in on what Forrester Research expects to be a nearly $50 billion U.S. health-information market in the next two years won’t be straightforward for Indian companies. While they have had success handling outsourced work for pharmaceutical companies and insurers, Indian companies have struggled to win business from U.S. hospitals, which will do the bulk of new health-tech spending.

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