Four out of 10 Americans have connected their TV to the Internet, according to a new Forrester study. If you’re just talking about the whippersnappers in the 18-to-32 age bracket, the number shoots up to 6 in 10.

Forrester credits Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3 for most of that; it says 42 percent of connected TV watchers are hooked up via a game console.

If you’re an oldster like me — who remembers the days of rabbit ears, Pong and three broadcast networks — that number seems staggeringly high. And we can attach a few caveats below.

But it’s not the first time we’ve seen stats like these.

Earlier this fall NPD reported that TVs have become the most common screen for Web video-watching. And Netflix says the PS3 often generates more streams per day than PCs do.

So if you’re willing to say these reports are at least directionally correct, it’s a big deal, at least for Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and everyone else who has been waiting on this moment.

If you do want to pick at these numbers, there are a couple ways to do that. For starters, note that the Forrester poll asks people if they have “ever accessed” the Internet on a TV, which is different from regular use. And it’s possible that many gamers are simply counting playing with other gamers as an Internet connection.

Most important is that Forrester’s numbers come from an online survey. And, as Forrester notes in the footnotes to their research, “respondents who participate in online surveys generally have more experience with the Internet and feel more comfortable transacting online.”

In other words: You can probably knock these numbers down a bit if you want to talk about the entire U.S. population. But even then, there’s definitely something here. And maybe that’s old news to everyone but me.

Google could be forgiven for fumbling tech that’s further away from its search business — if, say, its Wildfire acquisition goes sour. But if anyone should have figured out SEM, it should be Google. What’s going wrong?

To answer that question, you need to start with Google’s peculiar relationship with SEM — and with marketing software generally.

For advertisers and agencies, SEM software exists to make search buying more efficient. But from Google’s standpoint, SEM tools serve a different purpose entirely. They’re automated pipes that drive advertiser spend into search engines — including into Google search. Additionally, they’re ways to offer upsell off of Google’s existing ad network.

So while standalone SEM platforms such as Kenshoo or Adobe’s Efficient Frontier have to work very hard to make advertisers happy, Google doesn’t really need to work too hard to achieve its own goals in SEM (namely, increased revenue and higher share of spend). Google’s mammoth share of search queries fairly guarantees it a lion’s share of search budgets, with or without good marketing tools. Plus, a bevy of other search marketing providers already provide great automation to help advertisers spend more money in search, including within Google search itself. Google’s chief goals for SEM are already largely achieved by the rest of the market. Doing beyond the bare minimum amounts to duplicating efforts — which means wasting Google resources.

The goal of providing a pipe into Google search even creates a disincentive for Google to help advertisers spend money outside of Google ad networks. It’s no surprise that Forrester notes how DoubleClick Search “supports biddable buys on fewer media outlets than its competitors.” Kenshoo, by comparison, goes so far as to provide integration into Facebook, while IgnitionOne “supports 11 display networks and can programmatically create mobile-device-specific ad versions.” As channel-agnostic and network-agnostic buys become increasingly critical to marketers, failure to provide good cross-outlet support can really hinder advertisers using Google products. But from Google’s perspective, effectively supporting channel-agnostic buys means helping advertisers take ad spend away from Google — which is bad business.

Forrester does “hope that [Google’s] plan to integrate DoubleClick Search into a comprehensive Google online advertising suite will solve this platform’s shortfalls.” I’m less optimistic, because mediocrity runs across a lot of Google’s tech stack beyond search. Michael Greene, a senior analyst at Forrester, has rightly pointed to Google as a prime example of “media and technology behemoths … making credible runs at the end-to-end ad tech stack, even if some of their stacks suffer from a mix of ‘best-in-class’ and ‘just good enough.’” But that’s not a surprise. If Google’s aims for the tech stack are just to provide a system of pipes that support Google Advertising, then building a tech stack out of cheap parts is really all that’s required in most instances. Going above and beyond that is, again, counterintuitive.

Which is why the marketing community really needs to ask if Google is the best business to provide the end-to-end tech stack that marketers want. For Google’s tech stack competitors which don’t have ad inventory to sell (Adobe, for example), the chief reason to create a tech stack is to provide marketers with a suite of useful, integrated products, and to make money in the process. That’s a setup for a win-win (pending good execution, of course). But Google has its own agenda. And if that agenda gets in the way of creating good products so close to Google’s core business, how can we expect Google to provide better than ho-hum technology across the entire marketing spectrum? If Google wants the marketing world’s technology business — and not just its ad dollars — then it’s a question the company needs to answer, soon.

Bill Wise is CEO of marketing systems provider Mediaocean.

iStockphoto.com/mbortolino

“E-commerce has been on fire since its inception and it still continues to grow and outpace the overall retail economy,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester, who studied recent trends to come up with this year’s holiday forecast. “And because e-commerce is growing so much faster, it’s taking share from the offline world. It takes more share during Q4 than the rest of the year.”

In the report, Mulpuru concluded that the number of online shoppers in the U.S. will grow a modest 3 percent, but that the average shopper will spend $419 online this holiday, a 12 percent boost over 2011.

Overall, if spending does increase 15 percent this holiday, the rate of increase will be flat compared to the prior year, but the gains are still very impressive given the much larger base (see chart below). It also points to the fact that e-commerce still makes up only a small fraction of overall retail spending.

There are three factors driving consumers to spend more online this year:

• Online vs. offline: Customers would rather shop online to take advantage of the sales and to avoid crowds.
• Mobile commerce: Smartphones and tablets will likely make up 40 percent or more of traffic to a retailer’s site on the major shopping days as consumers get offers sent to them by email and check them out wherever they are. Still, conversion rates are fairly low, Mulpuru said.
• The economy: Overall, holiday retail estimates are extremely positive and consumer confidence scores hit a six-month high in October.

Still, the trend largely benefits online-only retailers, like Amazon, which means that physical retailers must come up with a plan to keep consumers coming to the stores or their Web sites.

Target and Best Buy are two of the big-box retailers that have committed to matching online prices to prevent “showrooming,” where people scan barcodes in the store to find better deals for the same product online. PayPal is also supporting price matching for customers who use the payment provider to make purchases. And Walmart is experimenting with same-day delivery in some markets to fuel its online transactions.

Mulpuru said she wasn’t sure if stunts like that would move the needle, but agreed that “the biggest reason why Amazon is gaining share is because of price, free shipping and doing it quickly.” She said Amazon is willing to subsidize those costs and to spend more to acquire and retain those customers. However, she said, there is some backlash from manufacturers. Companies like Samsung and Sony have started a universal price protection program, where they guarantee the same price no matter where you shop.

“That’s been long overdue,” she said. “There’s been a lot of monkeying around with what’s the right price. With mobile, price is transparent. Up until now, the manufacturer hasn’t had to enforce pricing.”

Forrester Research analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo recently tried to understand which types of data people are most concerned about sharing, by conducting a large survey of North American Internet users.

The big distinctions aren’t that surprising — for instance, 71 percent of those surveyed were concerned about companies accessing their credit card numbers, while only 38 percent were concerned about companies accessing their social profile data.

But there’s less agreement about which other data users feel okay about handing out, Khatibloo found. About half of the 37,350 people surveyed said they are willing to share their Internet browsing history, mailing address and email address — while half said they are not.

Do people actually act on their privacy concerns? Forty-four percent of all those surveyed said they had not completed an online transaction because of something they read in the company’s terms of use or privacy policy. That’s up from 38 percent in 2008.

Age was a significant factor in just about everything Forrester looked at, though. For instance, the survey found that more than half of consumers aged 18 to 34 are willing to share their personal data with brands in exchange for discounts. That willingness “declines precipitously” with age, Khatibloo said — less than 25 percent of those over age 55 will trade data for discounts.

The company is expected to sell $10 billion worth of iPads and $9 billion of Macs to business customers in 2012, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook. Those are 68 percent and 45 percent increases, respectively, over 2011.

And in 2013, spending on iPads and Macs could hit $16 billion and $12 billion respectively. Slowly but surely, Apple is making inroads into enterprise, a sector traditionally dominated by Microsoft. And, as Forrester notes, that is somewhat unexpected.

“The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market thus is … Apple,” the research outfit says in its report. “This is a surprise, because Apple has not and does not directly address the corporate market, while turning a wide variety of consumer technology markets upside-down. But its rapid growth in the corporate market has been the big surprise of 2011, and it will be even more of a factor in 2012.”

How can that be, when we so rarely hear stories about big enterprise deployments of Apple hardware? As Forrester explains, “The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent. That’s because corporate adoption of Apple products has been largely clandestine.”

Clandestine? If Apple’s not aggressively pushing its hardware into the enterprise market, how is it getting there?

Carried in by the rank and file. Employees are buying iPhones and iPads, and sometimes even MacBooks, as well. And enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end. Sometimes, it’s even subsidizing them or their use. This is the “consumerization of IT” we’re hearing so much about these days, and clearly it’s working very much in Apple’s favor.

It’s not a big surprise that location-based services aren’t terrifically mainstream — Foursquare says it has 15 million registered users worldwide, and one-time competitor Gowalla is now fully out of the market through a deal to send some of its staff to Facebook.

That said, awareness of geolocation apps is on the rise. Thirty percent of those surveyed by Forrester said they know what geolocation applications are, versus 16 percent last year.

And geolocation app usage is getting ever so slightly more gender-balanced. Now, 37 percent of users are women, up from 22 percent in 2010.

Geolocation app users tend to be post-college adults. Forty-three percent are between the ages of 23 to 31.

Forrester’s point in all this is to look at the bright side: Money. Young, male and overshare-y is a good marketing demographic.

P.S. If you add up the pie slices above, it makes it look like 5 percent of those surveyed use geolocation apps. However, Forrester said the total number is 6 percent with rounding. 

In the first quarter of 2011, Forrester surveyed consumers about their tablet preferences and some 46 percent said they’d like one that runs Windows. Asking the same question in the third quarter, Forrester found that interest in a Windows tablet had dropped dramatically — to 25 percent.

Quite a change in just nine months.

And that’s bad news for Microsoft, which now finds itself rushing the tablet-optimized Windows 8 to market as the window of opportunity closes. As Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder observes, “Microsoft has missed the peak of consumer desire for a product they haven’t yet released.”

Worse, it’s already two laps behind its rivals in the space and will almost certainly be even further behind by the time the first Windows 8 tablet debuts. Apple launched its second-generation iPad in early 2011 and will likely launch its successor in early 2012.

That means the first-generation Windows 8 tablets will be going head to head with the third-generation iPad, which also happens to be the market leader.

And that puts Microsoft in a tough spot. To really succeed it must not only overcome the disadvantages of being a fifth mover in the tablet market, it must meet and surpass a bar for quality and utility that’s been set very, very high by the market’s first mover. Says Gownder, “If Windows is to have any hope, its product strategists must not only bring new features to the platform but also must fundamentally reinvent the experience.”

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’s according to the Forrester research shop, which attaches the following qualifiers to its prediction:

1. Amazon would need to price the tablet below $300.
2. It would need to not screw up its supply chain.

As far as number two goes: Yep, sure. Good idea. That said, we should note that Amazon has had supply issues with its own hardware in the past, and that getting it right is hard for most companies, even those that produce hardware full time. Not a coincidence that the new guy running Apple has a particular knack for this stuff.

And as far as price goes — yes, cheaper things often sell better than expensive things. That’s the big lesson everyone took away from HP’s TouchPad fire sale, right? And it would make a lot of sense for Amazon to do what every other would-be iPad killer has not done, and compete with Apple by starting at a sub-iPad price.

But note that in Amazon’s lone entry into hardware to date, it has behaved like nearly every consumer electronics company does — start at a relatively high price point, then move down over time, while demand goes up. Remember that the Kindle, which now starts out at $114, was originally priced at $399 in 2007.

That doesn’t mean that Bezos won’t go low this time — just that it’s not a given. (Also, no need to listen when I crystal-ball-gaze on this stuff — I severely underestimated the Kindle’s impact four years ago.)

Speaking of advice — my favorite part of the Forrester report is when researcher Sarah Rotman Epps tells Amazon that the best way to break free of the pack of unsuccessful Android tablets is to not tell consumers that it is selling them an Android tablet. Right or wrong, it speaks volumes about Google’s struggles in the tablet war to date:

While some may view a partnership with Google as an asset, we see it as a challenge. Product strategists that we’ve spoken with at OEMs have voiced frustration about the limits of Android — its lack of polish, the terrible shopping experience in the Android Market, the rules that Google has set for Honeycomb use that limit differentiation, and the fragmentation of earlier versions of the OS. Only 9% of consumers considering buying a tablet actively prefer an Android tablet — compared with 16% who prefer iOS and 46% who prefer Windows. Barnes & Noble has chosen to emphasize its own brand and user experience on the Nook Color rather than emphasize the Google or Android brands, even though the Nook is built on Android. Amazon may not wish to go that far on the curation spectrum, but it does need to differentiate its flavor of Android from all the rest, and that may come from emphasizing the Amazon experience over the Google one.

According to Forrester Research, the iPad has more than 80 percent market share in the United States. But it has only 70 percent market share in Europe. And that remaining 30 percent presents a window of opportunity for the device’s would-be rivals.

Forrester cites a number of reasons for this, but two stand out. First, the research outfit believes Europe will account for 30 percent of worldwide consumer tablet sales in 2011, making it the second-largest market globally. And that market is largely untapped. Forrester surveyed more than 3,000 adults in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K. about their tablet ownership and interest, and found that those interested in buying a tablet in the future far outnumbered those who already own one.

Second, Apple’s retail presence in Europe is far smaller than it is in the States. The company has 238 stores in the U.S. But it has a quarter of that number in Europe. Says Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, “Other than the U.K., which has 30 of Europe’s 52 Apple Stores, Apple Stores are sparse in Europe, compared with the U.S., which has 238 Apple Stores.”

The Apple Store has proven a critical point of sale for the iPad, which isn’t as naturally aligned with a carrier distribution network as the iPhone. So Apple’s more limited retail presence in Europe could be viewed as a real advantage to the company’s rivals — if they can develop a real challenger to the iPad. But, of course, that’s no easy task, as Epps notes.

“Manufacturers, retailers and operators we spoke with all commented on the failure of the first seven-inch tablets that attempted to compete with the iPad,” says Epps. “The newer generation of iPad challengers, such as the 10-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Acer Iconia Tab, are getting better reception, but they’re still at a disadvantage to Apple in terms of channel strategy. … No tablet competitor has come close to Apple’s market share, and the non-iPad tablet market is extremely fragmented.”

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.

However, while consumers will have the capabilities this year, the research firm finds that mass-market adoption is still years away, and the category will be crowded with players, ranging from financial services firms, card networks, mobile operators, device makers, point-of-sale terminal vendors and start-ups.

Sure enough, in the past few weeks, we’ve seen reports of Google; Sprint; a coalition of carriers excluding Sprint, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express; and a host of start-ups that are all jumping into the space.

The report, authored by Thomas Husson, defines mobile payments broadly as any transaction that is initiated using a mobile phone–in the browser or by tapping the phone against a terminal to pay in the store.

Husson writes that while adoption may still be years off, what we will see in 2011 is large shipments of near-field communication devices from large handset makers that will make these tap-and-go transactions a reality.

The first NFC-compatible Android device is Samsung’s Nexus S (pictured here), which is now shipping. But Forrester estimates that manufacturers will ship between 40 million and 50 million NFC-enabled devices in 2011.

Still, the vast majority of purchases that are being made with mobile phones today are not physical goods, but rather digital content, such as applications and music.

But smartphones are routinely considered a threat by retailers, who fear that consumers are using their stores as showcases to decide what they want to buy, then using their devices to scan bar codes and conduct price comparisons in the store–and ultimately buying online for less.

Adoption of these features, however, is still fairly low. In the U.S., Forrester said, eight percent of survey respondents said they used their phone to compare store prices with online prices. About half of those people said they purchased an item on their phone that was not available while they were in the store.

Overall, the survey found that 12 percent of U.S. respondents said they had used their mobile phone to buy a product.

Forrester made a few recommendations for catapulting consumer adoption of mobile payments. It recommended making NFC-capable terminals more widely available, including in mass transit scenarios, and creating incentives for consumers to adopt the technologies by integrating loyalty awards and coupon redemption into the process.

“What can Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, teach other CEOs? Not very much. To date, he is a one-trick pony–a leader who has expertly refined and polished one very, very big idea–remaining unproven beyond the borders of that idea. Zuckerberg’s media profile vastly overshoots his abilities…Eventually we’ll find out if he’s Jeff Bezos…or Jerry Yang.”

–Forrester CEO George Colony is not ready to enshrine Mark Zuckerberg in the CEO Hall of Fame quite yet.

Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps penned those words back in June. Now, a month later, she’s eating them–largely because the iPad is selling so well. Apple (AAPL) sold 3.27 million of them in the device’s first quarter at market. Now, granted, that was in 10 countries and Epps’s forecast was for the United States alone. Still, international sales of the iPad didn’t begin until May 28 and by that time Apple had already sold more than a million of them in the U.S. And 5 days after Epps issued her prediction, Apple announced it had passed the 3 million iPads sold milestone. So there’s certainly some crow to be eaten here, which Epps, to her credit, willingly chokes down.

“Based on new data from Forrester’s consumer surveys, as well as Apple’s rate of ‘millioning,’ we think our initial forecast was conservative, especially in the short term, and we plan to publish an update later this year once we have more supply-side and consumer data,” she said in a blog post. “One of the assumptions we made in our initial forecast was that the iPad would behave like other similar consumer devices in its first year of adoption: When it went on sale in April, we assumed that sales would be strong based on pent-up demand for a hyped product; we then assumed that sales would slow in a summer slump, as is common with consumer technology purchases; and that sales would spike again in the holiday season. But the iPad isn’t behaving like other consumer devices: It has a steamroller of momentum behind it that indicates incredibly strong demand for this entirely new form factor.”

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at D8 last month. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars….PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of x people.”

Jobs stopped short of predicting just how quickly this transition will occur, but in a research report published today, Forrester (FORR) hazards a guess: By 2015, nearly one out of four computers sold in the U.S. will be a tablet. According to analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, tablets will outsell netbooks by 2012 and desktops by 2015.

“Catalyzed by the introduction of the Apple iPad, the tablet market will kick off with a modest 3.5 million units sold in the US in 2010 but will grow at a whopping 42 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between now and 2015,” she writes. “Tablet growth will come at the expense of netbooks, which have a similar grab-and-go media consumption and Web browsing use case as tablets but don’t synchronize data across devices like the iPad does.”

Five years from now, Epps says, only laptops will have a greater share of the PC market (42 percent). At that point, tablets will claim a 23 percent share, and the only thing keeping desktop sales alive will be processing-heavy consumer needs like gaming and video editing.

“Although notebook/laptop users will still be outnumbered by desktop users in 2015, laptops will represent the lion’s share of new PC purchases from now through 2015,” Epps writes.

“Even though consumers may use tablets for many of the same functions for which they currently use laptops–media consumption, email, Web browsing, and light productivity–they won’t replace laptops,” the analyst concludes. “Instead, tablets will become a consumer’s other computer that’s more portable within the home and outside of it.”

In other words, Epps thinks Steve Jobs is right when he says the PC is destined to become a “truck.” But she disagrees that the tablet is the car that will replace it. In her view, it’s the laptop that’s the car. Which I suppose makes the tablet a bicycle–not necessarily a bad thing from a sales point. Almost everyone owns a bicycle, right?

It remains to be seen whether Apple (AAPL) has created an entirely new computing category with the iPad. But at the very least, analysts seem to believe the company has created an enduring growth engine.

• Charlie Wolf, Needham & Company
  “Because Apple is defining a new category of devices, sales of the iPad are likely to ramp slowly. But the $500 starting price point is low enough to attract a sizable portion of the early adopter crowd, consisting of iPhone and iPod owners. It’s noteworthy that the iPad’s initial price is below the iPhone’s initial price and not much higher than the price of the first iPod, introduced in 2001. Our best guess at this time is the Apple could sell four million iPads in its initial year on the market, which translates into at least $2 billion of revenue.”
• Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray
  “Originally we were estimating sales of 2m units in the first calendar year at a price point of $600-$800. With the actual $499/$629 price point, we believe Apple will sell 3m-4m units in the first 12 months….After using the iPad, we believe it will cannibalize iPod touch sales, but not Mac sales. The gadget is a premium mobile device, not a computer; as such, we see some iPod touch buyers stepping up to the iPad, but consumers looking for an affordable portable computer will likely stick with the MacBook lineup.”
• James McQuivey, Forrester
  “The iPad is a grown up iPod Touch. Apple has taken the safe route of offering its existing customers an option that goes beyond today’s iPod Touch in size and capability, but it has not offered a new category of devices that tackles the 5-6 hours of media we each consume every day. With no integrated social media for sharing photos, recommending books, and sharing home video, the iPad misses a big piece of what makes media so powerful. As it stands, by relying on the App Store as the single most important draw of the device besides its attractiveness, the iPod Touch is a significant step toward making tablets respectable. But making tablets respectable should have been the least of Apple’s ambitions. It had (and still has) the opportunity to create a new media experience in consumers’ lives. As it stands, a quick, well-structured response from Amazon in the next version of Kindle could easily be a contender here. That’s why I say that the iPad is priced lower than expected because it is less revolutionary than expected.”
• Mike Abramsky, RBC
  “Like the first iPod and iPhone, uptake may in time surprise as future versions improve and costs decline. The iPad’s intuitiveness and simplicity at key tasks (browsing, email, media, watching videos, games, reading, working) may appeal to consumers for whom existing PC experiences are intimidating, inadequate, delivering 90%+ of the features of traditional PCs with less complexity than traditional PCs. Uptake however may require in-store demos to truly experience the richness of iPad’s experience.”
• Tavis McCourt, Morgan Keegan
  “The iPad has been long anticipated so we are not shocked by the lack of stock movement. Given the price point, we suspect initial sales will be strong (this is Apple, and there are many enthusiasts), and then simmer down a bit after a few months. The ultimate success of a new product category will be the unique apps developed for this device, and with the SDK just going out today, it is hard to know how impressive they will be. However, the good news is that aside from maybe modest iPod Touch cannibalization, we doubt that the iPad will cannibalize any revenues from the massive margin pools within the iPhone and Mac product categories.”
• Craig Moffett, Bernstein Research
  “Longer term, the iPad offers the potential to redefine the boundaries between print and video, turning formerly passive media into active ones, and in the process making what are currently low bandwidth applications (say, reading a newspaper) become much more bandwidth intensive (e.g. by embedding video rather than still pictures).”
• Mark Moskowitz, J.P. Morgan
  “iPad is not for everyone, and the first-generation product is sure to have its critics given the prelaunch buzz. In our view, the iPad is a smart, nimble device for heavy content users–Apple’s core customer. iPad is a hybrid of sorts, marrying select benefits of the smartphone and notebook. We expect the market to be small at first, but the gamer and education verticals should construct a meaningful growth ramp longer term.”

This, according to research firm Forrester, which claims technology spending will roar back to life in 2010, ending the econalypse once and for all.

“While the Q3 2009 data for the U.S. and the global market showed continued declines in tech purchases (as we expected),” the company said in its report, U.S. and Global IT Market Outlook: Q4 2009, “we predict that the Q4 2009 data will show a small increase in buying activity, or at worst, just a small decline.”

Forrester (FORR) expects U.S. IT spending to grow by 6.6 percent in 2010 after falling 8.2 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, global IT spending, which plummeted 8.9 percent last year, will rise 8.1 percent in 2010 to more than $1.6 trillion.

Driving the recovery: Software, hardware and communications equipment. According to Forrester, worldwide spending on software is set to grow by 9.7 percent in the months ahead, spending on hardware and other computer equipment by 8.2 percent and spending on comm gear by 7.6 percent.

Said Forrester principal analyst Andrew Bartels: “All the pieces are in place for a 2010 tech spending rebound. In the U.S., the tech recovery will be much stronger than the overall economic recovery, with technology spending growing at more than twice the rate of gross domestic product this year.”

But this assumes there will be no further financial disaster in 2010. If this is not the case, then we have something else to look forward to.

“The most likely alternative to our forecast that the U.S. and global IT markets will recover in 2010 is a faltering tech market due to a double-dip recession that returns in 2010 after a brief two- to three-quarter economic recovery,” Forrester explains. “Should this happen, U.S. tech purchases would decline by 3% to 4% in 2010, with a second-half decline offsetting a first-half tech revival.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Econalypto: A Rightsizing Roundup
• Google: Whoops! Econalypse
• Econalypse Now
• Analyst: The Great Dark Times Cometh!
• Wall Street: Give Me Something to Stop the Bleeding
• GOOG at $398? Clearly, You’re Dyslexic.
• WaMu: Epic Bail
• Ballmer: Better Safe Than Lehman Bros.
• Lehman Brothers: $2.5 Billion for a Bankruptcy Well Done
• Here’s $39 Billion in Recognition for Your Hard Work on the Forthcoming Financial Crisis
• Weekend at Bernanke’s II
• Weekend at Bernankes

But will they actually pay up? Here, the conventional wisdom is not so helpful. Nor are studies predicting consumer behavior. To wit:

• Nearly 50 percent of U.S. Web users are willing to pay for online news, says the Boston Consulting Group.
• Not a chance, says Forrester (FORR): Try 20 percent.

For what it’s worth, my money’s on the Forrester number, or one that’s even lower. My gut says people love consuming news, but only in the broadest sense–Obama doesn’t really Twitter! What was Belichick thinking?–and that sort of stuff, which appeals to a very large audience, will always be free, and you’ll get it from Google (GOOG) or something like Yahoo (YHOO). Which leaves you with a small audience willing to pay for everything else.

But! We should note that people are indeed paying for “content” right now. In fact, they’re paying for a lot of it: $115 a month, up seven percent from last year, says NPD Group. The breakdown:

As of August 2009, 81 percent of U.S. households subscribed to a television service (satellite TV, basic/premium cable, or fiber-optic television service). A similar percentage of households (76 percent) paid for Internet subscriptions. Seventeen percent subscribed to an online music service or satellite radio; and 14 percent subscribed to online gaming subscription services.

More traditional forms of entertainment subscriptions, however, did not fare so well. The number of people subscribing to newspapers fell by 2 percentage points to reach 29 percent in August 2009. Forty-one percent of consumers subscribed to magazines this year, compared to 43 percent who did so last year.

According to NPD, an influx of new smartphone owners has led to an increase in mobile data-plan subscriptions: 9 percent of U.S. consumers had mobile data subscriptions this year, versus just 6 percent last year. Fourteen percent of consumers subscribed to a home-video subscription service, like Netflix, this year, which is 2 percentage points higher than last year.

Ah, see? Problem solved: If you want Americans to pony up for stuff on the Web, just link it to something they’re already paying for, like their cable or Internet subscription.

This is what smart guys like John Malone have been talking about for a while, and it’s also the core of the strategy behind the Time Warner (TWX)/Comcast (CMCSA)/everyone else “TV Everywhere” gambit. But it’s also what many people have been trying to do for a very long time–ask the music industry–with limited success.

Overall, Forrester predicts, U.S. consumers will purchase three million e-readers by the end of this year. That’s a bump from the analyst shop’s earlier prediction of two million. It thinks Amazon (AMZN) will claim 60 percent of the market, with Sony (SNE) taking 35 percent and the rest going to also-rans like iRex.

Have to say, I find that one a bit head-scratching: I gather that Sony’s device is supposed to have created a footprint overseas, but while I see the occasional Kindle on the subway or an airplane, I have never, ever, ever seen a Sony reader in the wild. Have you?

For what it’s worth, Forrester figures e-reader sales will double, to six million next year, pushed by media buzz along with the introduction of new devices, including the Apple (AAPL) wondertablet that everyone is convinced will show up–someday. They may even be right.

Rabid demand for the iPhone has emptied not just the company’s physical retail outlets, but its online store as well. “We continue to see extremely high levels of demand for the iPhone which means it comes in and out of stock very quickly and will be why the Web site hasn’t had any since Monday,” an O2 spokesperson told the Telegraph.

News of the shortage comes just days after O2 rivals Orange and Vodafone both announced plans to carry the iPhone later this year, bringing an end to O2’s exclusivity deal with Apple (AAPL). If Apple is unable to meet consumer demand with just a single U.K. carrier, how will it cope with three?

A reasonable question, but one for which Apple presumably has an answer. Said Forrester (FORR) analyst Mark Mulligan, “I don’t think [Apple] would expand if it couldn’t meet consumer demand, as that would lead to extreme consumer dissatisfaction–which compared to its peers, Apple is usually good at avoiding.”

That insight is blindingly obvious, of course. But a new study from Forrester (FORR) tries to figure out just how much Amazon (AMZN) and its competitors will have to discount their devices in order to get them into millions and millions of peoples’ hands.

The answer? A lot.

After flourishing a variety of of charts and graphs (Forrester tells us that it employed something called a Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, which sounds like an awesome Dr. Evil device but turns out to be just a pedestrian marketing technique), Forrester argues that the pricing sweet spot for a dedicated e-book reader is…$50.

The readers will get a whole lot cheaper, of course, just as all consumer electronics do. But given that Amazon’s Kindle2 now goes for $299, and Sony’s (SNE) comparable gizmo will go on sale this year for $399, it may take a while to get there.

And even then, Forrester argues, the Kindle or its equivalent may never reach the same kind of ubiquity that Apple’s (AAPL) iPod line has–in large part because of the success of Apple’s iPhone and other do-it-all devices. It’s an argument I’ve made several times, but just for variety, here’s Forrester’s take:

The price points of multi-use devices like smartphones and netbooks informs the value that they assign to a single-purpose device like an eReader. With new 3G iPhones selling for $199 and a variety of netbooks selling for $300, devices in adjacent categories put the squeeze on eReaders. Convenience plays a core role in consumers’ decision-making. For many, the superior functionality of dedicated eReaders simply isn’t seen as making them sufficiently more convenient than cheaper multifunction devices to justify the additional cost.

[Image credit: Jonathan Harford]

That’s the word from Gartner, which back in March was claiming the decline would be just 3.8 percent. The research outfit said Tuesday that it expects tech spending to fall to $3.2 trillion this year, down from $3.4 trillion in 2008. And it sees all four major segments of IT–hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications–suffering revenue declines in 2009 (click on chart below).

“The forecast decline in spending growth for the hardware and software segments in 2009 has almost stabilized, and only minor downward revisions have been made to these forecasts this quarter,” said Gartner’s Richard Gordon. “However, the full impact of the global recession on the IT services and telecommunications sectors is still emerging, and forecast growth in these areas has been further reduced significantly.”

That said, the company sees a rebound of 2.3 percent in 2010.

Gartner (IT) is the latest research firm to temper its projections for information technology spending this year in light of the ever-souring economy. Last week Forrester (FORR) lowered its expectations for 2009, saying the first two quarters of the year were worse than expected and that the decline will carry out for the rest of the year. It did, however, say we can expect a rebound in 2010.

We’ve hit bottom. Finally.

In its latest “US and Global IT Market Outlook” report, Forrester (FORR) says information technology spending in 2009 will fall 10.6 percent in 2009. And while that’s far worse than the three percent decline the research outfit forecast at the beginning of the year, it’s also the nadir of this particular crisis, and we are at the beginning of a rebound that will gain momentum in 2010.

According to Forrester, anyway.

“While Q1 2009 saw a scary drop in purchases in the U.S. tech market, ironically that is good news for the long run and we expect to see a stronger rebound sooner,” Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels said in a statement. “The big drops are not precursors to further declines; rather, we think they are evidence of a temporary pause in U.S. tech purchases, which we expect to start recovering in Q4 as businesses realize that they overreacted in the first quarter.”

So after a year of gloom and doom, things are beginning to look up.