The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

• The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
• Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
• The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

On Friday afternoon, Dell gave an interview to the trade publication CRN (which used to be called Computer Reseller News) crowing about his company’s apparent share gains in the market for servers.

What got him excited was preliminary data (as in, not yet published) from the market research firm IDC, which followed similar findings from another research firm, Gartner (again, not yet published), that supposedly shows healthy gains for Dell and big losses at HP.

According to the numbers Dell shared with CRN, IDC found Dell — No. 2 in the worldwide server market — to have grown its share of the server market to nearly 28 percent, while HP’s fell from north of 35 percent a year to slightly below 31 percent. “HP is losing share at a staggering rate, and they are losing it to Dell,” Dell proclaimed.

HP, which had led the segment for the better part of two decades, didn’t respond to Dell’s claims. But it did respond a day earlier, after Dell enterprise chief Marius Haas gave a similar interview — again to CRN — claiming similar data from Gartner. “One quarter does not a trend make. … 17 years is a trend,” retorted Jim Ganthier, a marketing exec in HP’s server group.

Dell hasn’t bothered to wait for either research firm to finalize and publish their data, and I’ve asked both firms to comment on that. I’m no expert in the processes these firms follow, but from what I understand, execs at companies like Dell, HP and IBM see these “preliminary” figures before they get published in order to give the company a chance to dispute them if they vary from what’s really going on. When Gartner and IDC get around to publishing press releases, expect Dell to make a second push on this topic, and maybe give more interviews.

Dell naturally has an urge to pounce on HP and score a few punches. HP has been using the occasion of Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged-buyout plan to create uncertainty among Dell customers. Way back on Feb. 5, when the buyout plan was first floated, HP issued a statement saying, “Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell’s customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity.”

With IBM said to be in on-again, off-again talks with China’s Lenovo to sell its industry-standard server business, and Dell going private, HP is arguing that it is the one major vendor not engaged in a significant corporate shake-up, and thus able to focus most on its customers’ needs. Indeed, HP’s Dave Donatelli led a major Webcast with HP partners last week, touting that very message.

Neither company’s shares are really responding to any of the trash-talking today. HP shares are up slightly this morning to $20.76 a share, while Dell shares are also up a little to $13.35, or about 30 cents below the $13.65 buyout price that Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake have offered to take the company private.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. Sources say that Apple is pulling engineers from the next version of OS X and assigning them to its mobile OS in order to get a preview ready in time for next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
2. By 2017, more than half of companies will require their employees to supply their own devices on the job, according to a new Gartner report.
3. A California court has ruled in Facebook’s favor versus “typosquatters” who benefited from registering domain names with misspellings like “gacebook” and “dacebook.”
4. Speaking of Facebook, it’s growing — but that growth rate has seen a slow decline over the past year.
5. As it tries to convince consumers that the iPhone and Android aren’t the only options, Microsoft released a hard-edged, humorous ad for Windows Phone.
6. Buying a laptop is all about timing; if you can, you might want to wait.
7. “This is just like another language, just a different set of life skills than if you learned French or Spanish.” That’s Krishna Vedati, CEO of Tynker, a platform aimed at teaching children to code.
8. Consumer electronics warranty provider SquareTrade says Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 is more breakable than both the S3 and the iPhone 5.
9. In AllThingsD Must-Reads, Bizo CEO Russell Glass writes, “There is a revolution brewing in the enterprise and it’s starting right at the desk of the chief marketing officer.”
10. To show off its ability to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms, IBM released the smallest movie ever made: An animated short called “A Boy And His Atom.”

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

The finding comes in a new report from Gartner containing the results of a survey of CIOs around the world. So it’s not for nothing that Gartner calls these BYOD strategies “the most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing” in a decade.

When you think about it, BYOD amounts to a pretty fundamental shift in the way companies handle the knotty questions around supplying employees the tools they need to get the job done. For years, standard operating procedure at pretty much every company was to give a computer and maybe a phone or BlackBerry to every employee who needed them, and for the company to bear the cost. (Gartner, incidentally, includes PCs in its BYOD definition.)

What started with an occasional request for the IT department to support smartphones and tablets with access to work email has blown up into a huge shift in the way that corporate IT services are supplied to employees.

Right now, Gartner said, mid-sized companies of $500 million to $5 billion in sales and 2,500 to 5,000 employees are most likely to be using a BYOD approach. BYOD-friendly companies are twice as common in the U.S. as in Europe, but employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device on the job.

And if you’re looking for some figures to drive the point home, here’s one: 38 percent of companies expect to stop supplying employees with their devices entirely by 2016. But executives aren’t yet completely sold on the idea: Only 22 percent say they’ve made a good business case for adopting a BYOD move. There are, Gartner said, many benefits, not the least of which are lower costs and a happier work force.

Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

Yesterday’s reports from the market research firms IDC and Gartner showed conclusively what pretty much anyone paying attention had already suspected — that the bottom has finally fallen out of the PC business. During the first quarter of 2013, the combined shipments showed their worst year-on-year decline ever.

Reversing that trend is probably not an option, which means that a fundamentally new chapter in the history of the personal computer industry is unequivocally here. Shareholders in those companies will start making value judgments accordingly. That was in evidence in the premarket trading this morning.

With a few minutes to go before the opening of markets in New York, shares of market leader Hewlett-Packard were down by nearly 6 percent. Dell, still the subject of an ongoing fight over its proposed $24.4 billion plan to go private in a leveraged buyout transaction, was down only slightly.

Chipmaker Intel was down nearly 3 percent. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s one remaining rival, was down 2.7 percent. Microsoft, the primary supplier of operating system software to the world’s PCs, was down 3.5 percent.

Apple, the maker of the iPad, which arguably has disrupted the PC industry, but is also North America’s third-largest supplier of PCs, was down by $2, or less than half of a percentage point.

As you might expect, there’s good news for any company in the business of building tablets and mobile phones, and lousy news for those building PCs. Worldwide sales of “devices,” a category that combines PCs, tablets, mobile phones and ultramobiles (tiny notebooks, presumably), will approach a combined three billion units by 2017, representing growth of 34 percent from 2012.

Growth will be led by tablets, which are expected to grow by 70 percent, to 467 million units. Phones will break the two-billion-unit mark in 2017, Gartner says. Traditional PCs, on the other hand, will decline by fewer than 300 million units by that year. Obviously, this is bad news for the PC players, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who are both struggling to get their PC divisions back on track, while at the same time trying to kick-start mobile device plays. (Click the chart below to make it bigger.)

Another nugget in the Gartner report: Google’s Android devices will dominate, accounting for nearly a billion and a half unit sales by 2017. Its nearest competition will be Microsoft’s Windows, and Apple’s combined portfolio of Mac and iOS devices, which will split about a billion devices between them.

Worldwide, Gartner says, companies and organizations will spend a combined $3.8 trillion on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications. That’s $100 billion higher than the last forecast it made in October.

While the U.S. avoided the fiscal cliff that five months ago cast a pall over everything related to the global economy and thus IT spending, the automatic sequestration that has mandated sudden cuts in government spending has offset any gains. And while Europe has settled down, the latest sovereign debt issues in Cyprus have also served as something of a setback. Both are seen as short-term headwinds.

Spending on devices — smartphones, tablets and printers — has grown like crazy, which shouldn’t surprise anybody, and will continue to grow, the firm says. Last year, spending on devices was $665 billion globally, and is expected to reach $718 billion this year, or 8 percent more.

Spending on enterprise software is running a close second, and is expected to grow by more than 6 percent to $297 billion. Here, a slowdown in IT operations management software is being offset by growth in spending on database management systems.

IT services and data center systems are also expected to grow this year, but a bit more slowly than in the previous forecast. Spending is coming down in the near-term on external storage and in Europe. IT services is seeing some intense price competition and redirection of budgets away from new consulting projects.

The slowest-growing segment will be telecom services, which declined last year. Gartner says it will generate about $1.7 trillion in revenue, up about 2 percent from last year. Declines in spending on voice are being offset by mobile data.

“The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old.”

— BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins says Apple’s iPhone is tired and consumers are ready for something new, like the next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the Z10, the first smartphone to run it. But if that truly is the case, consumer research firms aren’t seeing it. Not yet, anyway.

According to a February IDC report, consumers are still pretty enthralled with Android and iOS. Currently, they are the two top-ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide. Together, they accounted for 91.1 percent of all smartphone shipments during the fourth quarter of 2012. So if iOS is as dated as Heins claims, the market hasn’t realized it.

And it may not for some time.

A new report from Gartner suggests that BlackBerry’s chances of riding a wave of born-again BlackBerry acolytes to smartphone market supremacy are slim indeed. The research outfit expects the company to claim less than a 5 percent global market share through 2016.

Said Gartner analyst Van Baker, “Market conditions will make it extremely difficult for BlackBerry to rise above iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 platforms.”

That the iPhone UI is five years old clearly isn’t a problem for Apple. But it is a problem for BlackBerry. Because if iOS is half a decade old, then BlackBerry 10 is half a decade late. And one need only look at the downward spiral of BlackBerry’s stock price and smartphone market share to see the havoc that delay has visited on the company.

With the iPhone, Apple upended the mobile computing market in 2007. Only now, in 2013, has BlackBerry finally managed to ship an operating system and handset that can reasonably compete with it. And in the five years it has taken BlackBerry to do that, Apple has lapped it not once, not twice, but six times. And it has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones in the process.

So it’s not enough for Heins to simply say the iPhone is outdated and its UI stale. He needs to deliver a smartphone and mobile OS that prove, definitively, that they are outdated and stale. Has BlackBerry done that with BB 10 and the Z10?

The latest market data from research firm Gartner found worldwide server sales declined by 0.2 percent, even as revenue from sales of those servers increased by more than 5 percent. For the full year though, sales increased by 1.5 percent on a unit basis, while revenue declined slightly.

Budget worries caused many companies to hold back on replacing older x86 machines, Gartner said, especially in the enterprise and in some mid-tier data centers. That no doubt factored into some worries around Intel’s outlook when it reported Q4 earnings last month. The only ones really buying were big players like Google, Facebook and China’s Baidu. Sales of RISC-based machines running Unix, as well as specialized hardware like Hewlett-Packard’s Itanium servers, were also weak.

IBM made the most on a revenue basis, clocking in sales worth north of $5 billion, while HP sold the most on a unit basis, with a little less than 664,000 units.

On a regional basis, North America saw unit shipments grow 5.5 percent, followed by Asia/Pacific at 3.4 percent, and Latin America, which was essentially flat.

Europe, on the other hand, declined substantially, and that’s where a lot of the pain was. As sovereign debt and economic concerns continued to take much of the oxygen out of the room in those countries, server sales declined by more than 10 percent on a unit basis, Gartner said. Most companies there saw their unit sales decline except for Japan’s Fujitsu and Cisco Systems. In Cisco’s case, its unit sales grew by nearly 20 percent, but that was off a low base relative to the other vendors. By comparison, Cisco sold about 14,000 servers in the region, versus HP which sold nearly 248,000.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2013, Gartner said to expect modest growth, offset a little by a boost in the use of virtualization, which allows one physical machine to run as if it’s many virtual machines. Virtualization logically tends to eat into the overall volume of machines needed. Simply put, where you once needed two or four or eight servers, it’s pretty likely you can now, given the improvement in processing power plus virtualization, replace them with one or two or three.

Here’s the worldwide breakdown for the top five vendors in the quarter, revenue first.

World-wide sales to end users totaled 1.75 billion units in 2012, a 1.7 percent decline from 2011 sales, Gartner said, adding that fourth-quarter 2012 smartphone sales reached 207.7 million units, 38.3 percent higher than the same period last year.

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Samsung’s semiconductor spending spiked 29 percent to $23.9 billion last year, the research house said. And while Apple’s chip purchases rose 14 percent during the same period, they topped out at only $21.4 billion. In the end, Samsung purchased a full 8 percent of the world’s semiconductors; Apple bought 7.2 percent.

That’s a significant increase in semiconductor consumption for both companies. Apple spent $17 billion on semiconductors in 2011, giving it a 5.7 percent share of chip purchasing for the year, according to Gartner. Meanwhile, Samsung spent $16.7 billion for a 5.5 percent share. Driving the year-over-year increases: Spiking demand in the smartphone and tablet markets, where Samsung and Apple continue to slug it out.

For one thing, there are questions about CEO succession. Current CEO Paul Otellini (pictured) surprised everyone in November when he announced plans to retire well before it was expected. All the smart money is being placed on an internal successor being named, though Intel’s board of directors will give at least some consideration to outsiders. Here’s a pretty thorough list.

Management issues aside, Intel has a more fundamental question to struggle with: The personal computer industry, to which Intel has long been the primary arms merchant, is contracting. Data from both Gartner and IDC showed a market that shrank in 2012 by more than 3 percent — or about 13 million units. And there’s little sign of that changing.

The damage to the PC industry is being wrought by tablets and smartphones, markets where Intel has yet to penetrate with chips of its own in any meaningful way. At the International CES, Intel showed off its Lexington and Bay Trail generations of mobile chips. Impressive as they may be — one attraction is to bring the x86 instruction set that is a fundamental underpinning of mainstream PCs to tablets and phones — the chips won’t be inside any devices on store shelves until late this year.

It didn’t impress analysts at Piper Jaffray, who wrote in a research note to clients, wrapping up their impressions of CES, that the base of customers the new chips will attract is “not likely large enough to move the needle for the company,” and that “we continue to be concerned about the rate of cannibalization from tablets. We believe it is unlikely that 2013 sees any renewed interest in PCs.”

Meanwhile, Intel has one business that is largely safe from a meaningful competitive threat: Servers. Yes, it’s safe for now, but not entirely. Server chips using technology licensed from ARM — the British chip-design firm whose technology is found in most all of those non-Intel mobile devices — are on the way and, if nothing else, looking like an interesting option for the not-so-distant future.

The uncertainty has certainly weighed on Intel’s shares, which fell by more than 8 percent in 2012 but have since recovered. The shares were up more than 1 percent today in trading on the Nasdaq to $22.41 by midday in New York.

So what does the Street expect today? Per-share earnings of 45 cents on revenue of $13.53 billion. However, there are whispered numbers making the rounds, suggesting that Intel may fall short. That would be rare, as Intel typically beats the Street, even in tough quarters. But then, this isn’t just any tough quarter.

That’s the assessment of market research firm Gartner, whose PC market data was released today. It’s also roughly in line with data released by research firm IDC on Friday.

First, the quarterly rankings: Gartner was notable in the third quarter of 2012 for giving the top spot in the market to China’s Lenovo, while HP remained atop the IDC ranking. The difference is that IDC counts workstations — tricked-out professional PCs — while Gartner does not.

Gartner says HP may have sacrificed some profit margins to hold on to market share, while Lenovo’s growth rate kept it under pressure. Dell’s year-on-year PC sales on a unit basis cratered by more than 20 percent.

Obviously, Windows 8 didn’t spur any growth. And a lot of hope for getting PC sales going north again lies in smaller, lighter devices like Ultrabooks and convertible tablets — notebooks with detachable displays. But the fact is that dedicated tablets like the iPad have taken the life out of PC sales for a few years in a row now.

Here’s the table for the full year. The notable figure here is the 6.7 percent decline in units sales for HP, which is nearly twice the size of the industry’s decline as a whole. HP won the year, but it sure looks like it hurt.

As analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy put it: “This shows two things. First, when HP decides to stem the flow of PC market share loss, they can and did it with a much-improved PC line-up. Second, it demonstrates that Lenovo, who for a time looked infallible, is actually human in the PC space.”

Nokia accounted for 7.2 million, or 4.3 percent, of the 169.2 million smartphones sold world-wide in the latest quarter, taking it down from third place in April-June, Gartner said.

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Speaking at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Monday morning, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner, predicted that iPads will outnumber BlackBerrys in enterprise by 2014. “Tablets will continue to shake up the business world,” Sondergaard said. “In less than two years, iPads will be more common in business than Blackberries. Some CIOs are now placing orders for tens of thousands of iPads at a time.”

If that comes as a surprise, it really shouldn’t. Now that the iPad meets many enterprise-level security requirements and supports the mobile device management solutions that businesses often demand, more companies are embracing “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) programs that allow their employees to use the gadgets they use at home in the workplace as well. So, too, are more companies making the iPad standard issue hardware for their employees. SAP, for example, currently manages about 18,000 iPads. According to Sondergaard, large deployments like that will become increasingly common in the years ahead.

“Just two years from now, 20 percent of sales organizations will use tablets as the primary mobile platform for their field sales force,” Sondergaard said. “And by 2018, 70 percent of mobile workers will use a tablet or a hybrid device that has ‘tablet like’ characteristics.”

Gartner made its latest prediction at its annual Symposium and ITxpo in Orlando today. If that number feels a little familiar, it’s not your imagination. It was just this April when Gartner said IT spending in 2012 would be exactly that same figure: $3.7 trillion. Turns out it was $3.6 trillion. So what’s a $100 billion between friends?

Anyway. Here’s another prediction: By 2015, there will be 4.4 million jobs worldwide devoted to the support of big data, of which 1.9 million will materialize in the U.S., says Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s global head of research. Even better, he predicts that each job created by big data will generate three more outside of IT, working out to a grand total of about six million jobs.

There is, however, a big wrinkle: There will probably be a shortage of trained people to take those jobs, meaning only about one-third of them will ever get filled. Crazy, right? Gartner’s not the first to notice this trend: A study by McKinsey found that the demand for people with the deep analytical skills required to make use of information created by big-data work will come up short by a six-figure sum by 2018, prompting some start-ups like Trifacta to seek ways to automate that process in software.

“This is going to be the first time in a decade and half that [companies are] actually going to have to teach someone to use Windows.”

– Stephen Kleynhans, a Gartner Inc. analyst, quoted by The Wall Street Journal

The spot shows PCs and tablets from the likes of Acer, Lenovo and Sony, including touchscreens which are, in part, intended to make the Windows ecosystem more competitive with devices like Apple’s iPad. The ads (see the video embedded below) starts with a countdown, as if for a rocket launch, but gets stuck on the number 8. It ends by showing a young girl “painting a picture” on a PC screen, and then showing the printed result to an adult, with the tagline “Windows Reimagined.”

The ads come 11 days before Microsoft is expected to officially debut Windows 8 at an event in New York, along with its Surface tablet device — which, oddly enough, is not shown in the ad.

It’s going to take the full buzz-generating capabilities of Microsoft and its partners to reverse the slide in the sales of PCs. Just last week, the market research firms Gartner and IDC reported that PC sales that declined by more than 8 percent from the same period a year ago. The slide in sales has been blamed in part on consumers who have held back on making PC purchases, knowing that a new version of Windows has been in the offing. But rarely in the past has a iteration of Windows significantly reignited PC sales by itself.

Corporations, meanwhile, are more conservative, and tend not to buy machines with the latest version of Windows until it has been upgraded once or twice by Microsoft with a service pack or two.

On top of all that, there has been the ongoing challenge of tablets like the iPad, and others running Google’s Android operating system, that have eaten into sales of PCs, particularly notebooks. Ads for those devices were also in heavy rotation during Sunday’s football games.

Here’s the ad:

In numbers just released, Gartner Group confirmed that HP, which took the crown away from Dell some years back, is now the No. 2 PC maker, behind China’s Lenovo.

It is for Lenovo a dubious achievement that had been pretty well telegraphed last quarter. But let’s have a look at the numbers for the third quarter of 2012.

Overall shipments declined by 8.3 percent, according to Gartner’s reckoning, and totaled 87.5 million units worldwide. At least part of that decline Gartner lays at the door of Microsoft, whose Windows 8 operating system has yet to ship, prompting companies and some consumers to hold off on any buying decisions.

The usually healthy back-to-school season was a wash, and by September retailers were focused more on clearing out unsold inventory ahead of Windows 8 than anything else.

As you can see in the numbers to the right (click to enlarge), Lenovo edged out HP on the market share front by a only a whisker, maybe two, while Dell stayed in the No. 3 spot. Whether or not HP can finish out the year in the No. 1 spot it held for the first two quarters of the year will depend on a strong finish in the fourth quarter, which, given the state of the world economy, is far from certain.

Frankly, HP is probably happy to let Lenovo have the title. For months there’s been grumbling about how aggressive Lenovo, which is about one-third owned by a Chinese state-controlled entity, has been on pricing. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Lenovo was willing to take little to no profit and even lose money on some models in order to seize worldwide bragging rights.

But it’s sort of a Pyrrhic victory. The PC market has never contracted quite like this in its entire history, with the possible exception of the 2002-2003 recession period. And isn’t the era of the personal computer over anyway? Yeah, actually it is, by one of many metrics.

Just look at the state of the U.S. market, where sales fell by nearly 14 percent over the year-ago period. U.S. consumers and companies bought 15.3 million PCs, down from 17.8 million in the third quarter of 2011. HP at least held on to the top spot in the States, with 27 percent of the market, versus Dell, which had 21.4 percent. Apple was third at 13.6 percent, and Lenovo fourth. Acer and Toshiba were essentially tied for fifth.

A few minutes after the Gartner numbers came in, I got the numbers from Gartner’s main rival, IDC, and it appears to be a disputed world title: IDC has HP still maintaining the slimmest of global leads.

IDC has the market declining by 8.6 percent in Q3 — much worse than the 3.6 percent contraction it had predicted — and HP ahead of Lenovo by 0.2 percent, which we’ll just call two whiskers again. See the numbers below. The worst part, clearly, is HP’s year-on-year decline of more than 16 percent. Ouch.

HP makes it clear whose interpretation of the market it prefers: IDCs. In a statement I just received it says: “While there are a variety of PC share reports in the market, some don’t measure the market in its entirety. The IDC analysis includes the very important workstation segment and therefore is more comprehensive. In that IDC report, HP occupies the No. 1 position in PCs.”

Workstations of course are the high-powered professional grade PCs that often have two or more CPUs and lots of graphics power and are used to animate movies and design buildings. I never knew IDC counted them as PCs as well, but if that’s how they do it, then that’s how they do it.

And while it may not come as a terrible surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to personal technology trends during the last few years, there’s nothing like a cold, hard number to make the point crystal clear.

Word of this tipping point came quietly in the form of a press release from the market research firm IHS (the same group formerly known as iSuppli). The moment came during the second quarter of 2012. For the first time in a generation, according to the firm’s reckoning, PCs did not consume the the majority of commodity memory chips, also known as DRAM (pronounced “DEE-ram”).

During that period, PCs accounted for the consumption of 49 percent of DRAM produced around the world, down from 50.2 percent in the first quarter of the year. The share of these chips going into PCs — both desktop and notebooks — has been hovering at or near 55 percent since early 2008, IHS says.

As shifts in market share statistics go, it at first seems insignificant until you consider the wider sweep of memory chips in the history of the modern technology industry. PCs have consumed the majority of memory chips since sometime in the 1980s. IHS couldn’t say when exactly when the first personal computers started showing up in appreciable numbers in homes and businesses.

And where are all those memory chips going? Tablets and smartphones for starters. IHS says that phones consumed more than 13 percent percent of memory chips manufactured, and it expects that figure to grow to nearly 20 percent by the end of this year. Tablets — including the iPad — consumed only 2.7 percent of the world’s memory chip supply. The remaining 35 percent, which IHS classifies as “other,” includes servers, professional workstations, and presumably specialized applications like supercomputers and embedded systems.

And given their rates of growth, IHS expects phones and tablets combined to consume about 27 percent of the world’s memory by 2013, while by that time PCs will consume less than 43 percent, making the decline, in the firm’s estimation, irreversible.

For PC-making companies, notably Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo, the shift marks the beginning of an overall decline in the importance of PCs in the overall chip supply chain. Memory chip makers like Samsung, Hynix and Micron will focus increasingly on winning the business of phone and tablet makers and over time concern themselves less with the needs of PC makers. “PCs are no longer generating the kind of growth and overwhelming market size that can singlehandedly drive demand, pricing and technology trends in some of the major technology businesses,” is how IHS analyst Clifford Leimbach put it.

Depending on when you start counting it, took about two decades for the PC industry to sell its first billion units, a milepost that the research firm Gartner pegged to the summer of 2002. Judging by its annual global sales figure since then, it took about five years to sell the second billion, and about three more years to sell the third billion.

Last year, PC makers shipped about 353 million machines, an increase of about one-half of one percent, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone to see the industry finish the year with a slight decline in shipments year-over-year. No less a barometer of the PC industry than Intel lowered its sales guidance for the third quarter of this year, citing weak demand. It is currently in the midst of a campaign to both re-ignite market interest in PCs and attack the market for phones and tablets.

Compare the PC to smartphones. IHS expects people around the world to buy 655 million smart phones this year, which would amount to nearly twice the number of PCs sold last year and almost three times the number of notebook PCs that will sell this year.

And as for tablets, look no further than the iPad: For the last four quarters reported (Q4 2011 through Q3 2012), Apple has sold 55.4 million iPads, which amounts to only 5 million fewer than all the PCs that Gartner says HP sold in 2011.

So perhaps now the academic debates about where the Post-PC Era begins can come to a close. I remember the first buzz about it back in 2000 with consumer electronics makers like Sony — jealous of being left out of the PC feeding frenzy brought on by the first wave of the consumer Internet craze — tried to sell “Internet devices” that looked like PCs and served up the Web and email without costing quite as much as one. They didn’t take.

PDAs like the Palm Pilot and Microsoft’s Pocket PCs made some progress, priming us for living with handheld devices that stored data we needed close at hand. The Blackberry and the Treo became the first of what we would call “smartphones.”

But the PC always held sway as the home base of any digital person’s daily life. Now, it’s entirely possible, though not yet common, to get through modern life without one. Some people have sought to “go paperless” in their day-to-day lives by relying on tablets and smartphones for the things they used to print to paper. I wonder now if there may soon be a trend of going “PC-less.” It’s not gone yet, but it is going.

His comments couldn’t have been better timed. Just weeks later, Facebook’s “Like” button disruption had a wide-ranging ripple effect, slowing down thousands of sites worldwide. Amazon’s EC2 outage in early July took several big sites offline and slowed down many others. In the past year we’ve also seen outages from Microsoft and others which have had a cascading effect on companies that integrate with those services.

This is the downside of IT’s growing reliance on third-party components. These externally hosted elements, many of them cloud-based, include advertising or analytics code, social plug-ins, checkout functions, video or newsfeeds and many others.

While IT teams expect to reap the benefits of specialized external services to support more demanding consumer and enterprise workloads, these technologies add enormous complexity to corporate IT systems. Our research shows the typical U.S. Web site has anywhere from eight to 12 separate hosts contributing to a single transaction. Most of these are not from your own data center.

While the growing reliance on externally hosted elements provides richer customer experiences, they can also introduce risks because a single component can cause an application to slow down or fail. This interdependency raises a critical question: how can I manage my IT when it involves so many external elements out of my direct control?

Finding the answer requires new management approaches focusing less on the data center and more on the end user. Gartner notes this sea change is already happening: It estimates that 20 percent of the Global 2000 are trying to reconstruct their IT operational process frameworks in ways that accord with the monitoring and management of applications, rather than infrastructure, in a central place.

For many enterprises there’s a growing realization that applications are the business and that application performance — the speed and reliability with which you deliver content to end users — has a direct impact on revenue.

Third-party components comprise just one part of the complex set of services standing between your data center and your customers, all of which make application delivery more challenging. We call this set of services the Application Delivery Chain (ADC). IT managers know it has increased in complexity, and that problems can occur at any point along this chain, resulting in failed applications or slow load times (and lost business).

How can today’s IT execs tame the growing complexity of the Application Delivery Chain? Here’s how one successful enterprise, JetBlue Airways, handles it for its growing audience of mobile customers.

JetBlue is constantly refreshing its online experience, particularly in the mobile arena, because that’s where its on-the-go travel customers are. The company must deliver up-to-the-minute reservation bookings and flight data to travelers using numerous mobile devices over a variety of differing connection types.

According to Jonathan Stephen, Senior Producer Mobile Products, JetBlue addresses these challenges by:

• Benchmarking its application performance. This means clearly defining what is, and what is not, acceptable application speed, based on the needs of users.
• Engaging in a program of ongoing measurement of the user experience to make certain it meets the organization’s standards. JetBlue understands the application isn’t what leaves the data center; it’s what the user sees.
• Continually monitoring its entire Application Delivery Chain. Is this overkill? Not at all. In fact, this mindset separates the leaders from the laggards. By monitoring its applications and the underlying mobile networks delivering them, JetBlue not only ensures problems are quickly identified and resolved, but can prevent some problems from ever occurring. This allows it to keep pace with the expanding complexity of IT systems and the growing expectations of customers.

This application-specific approach is working well for JetBlue. Its applications consistently provide fast, reliable performance that doesn’t keep customers waiting. It’s a great example of an organization employing a new generation of application performance management, as it fully understands the connection to its business interests. Not only is JetBlue successfully managing the complexities of today’s IT systems, it’s using performance as a competitive advantage.

John Van Siclen is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compuware Corp.’s APM Business Unit.

In the second quarter of 2012, worldwide server shipments charted a 1.4 percent increase year over year from the second quarter of 2011, according to Gartner’s newest data. Meanwhile, worldwide server revenue for the same period declined 2.9 percent. Even Hewlett-Packard, which, based on revenue and shipments for the period, leads the worldwide server market, saw declines of more than 5 percent in both metrics.

The reason? The U.S. and Asia were the only two regions to post any growth for the quarter at all. And unsettled economic conditions in other regions dragged metrics down for everyone. To wit, server shipments in the U.S. rose 8.4 percent during the second quarter, bolstering revenue growth by 6.5 percent. But when lumped together with lousy numbers for pretty much everyone but Asia, their overall effect was muted.

So what’s behind the revenue decline for the period? Gartner analyst Jefferey Hewitt says it’s a combination of purchasing delays in advance of new hardware announcements and server spending constraints.

“An anticipated refresh in the mainframe segment obviously played a role here,” Hewitt told AllThingsD. “This segment is still relatively significant in terms of revenue, and IBM has announced new systems, which typically slows sales until the new systems are released and begin to “ramp up” in sales. … But as economic conditions improve and new systems in the mainframe and Unix space gain market traction, revenue should come back to the positive position — at least into single-digit growth.”

Samsung sold 90.43 million mobile handsets in the second quarter, giving the South Korean consumer electronics powerhouse a 21.6 percent market share, up from 20.7 percent in the first quarter this year and up from 16.3 percent the same quarter a year ago, Gartner’s figures showed.

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On Friday, HP shares set yet another ignominious milestone, hitting $18.98 a share and trading at the lowest levels seen since late 2004, falling nearly 2 percent on a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by more than 1.6 percent.

The fall came in partial reaction to an earnings warning from printer company Lexmark, which slashed its second-quarter sales and profit forecasts, blaming slackening demand in Europe and unfavorable currency conditions. Lexmark shares fell by more than 16 percent.

Naturally, investors worried that a bad market for printers would have to hurt the world’s largest maker of printers, as well. It’s certainly not an unreasonable conclusion: HP’s printer unit — recently combined with its PC unit — accounted for 20 percent of sales and 36 percent of operating profits last quarter. And it’s not as if the indications for the printer business weren’t already dour. HP has struggled with its own version of currency difficulties: Since many key printer components are made in Japan, the strong yen has continued to add a currency headwind to an already challenged market for printers and printing supplies.

A pronounced weakness in the printing business is one thing, but there were other alarm bells. Last week’s PC sales figures from Gartner and IDC suggest that HP’s PC sales fell by about 12 percent and change, with a lot of market ground given to China’s Lenovo. Not good for the world’s leading PC vendor.

Add to that sales of HP servers — HP is the world’s leading vendor in that market, too, which fell by nearly 10 percent in the first quarter, according to Gartner and IDC — and the case for optimism has dwindled substantially.

Attention then necessarily turns to HP’s major shareholders, and one in particular: Ralph Whitworth, the activist investor and head of Relational Investors, LLC, a San Diego-based investment firm with about $6 billion under management.

Whitworth (pictured) took a seat on HP’s board of directors in November of 2011 after disclosing that Relational had acquired about 17.3 million shares as of Sept. 30 amounting to nearly 1 percent of HP’s outstanding equity.

Since then, Whitworth has been buying a lot more HP shares: As of June 1, SEC filings (see the most recent one here) show that Whitworth, through Relational, has doubled his holdings in HP, and now controls more than 34.5 million shares, a stake that is approaching 2 percent of the shares outstanding. That would put Relational on track to be the eighth-largest institutional holder of HP shares. In short, you have to go pretty far to find an HP shareholder with more skin in the game than Ralph Whitworth.

And there’s no way that Whitworth can be happy with HP’s performance of late. In May alone, Relational spent more than $407 million accumulating HP shares, at average prices ranging from $22.02 to $22.71. All told, Relational has, since last August, spent more than $790 million — or more than 13 percent of the funds it has under management — on HP shares that as of Friday were worth less than $656 million, representing a drop in value of about 17 percent.

This all makes Whitworth’s voice in HP’s board meetings all the more weighty. As a condition of taking the board seat, Whitworth agreed not to publicly seek HP’s sale or merger with another company or a spinoff of any of its assets. Whitworth will no doubt have other levers to pull. And nothing in the agreement forbids him from arguing for any course of action behind the closed doors of HP board meetings.

At this point, it’s worth looking at Whitworth’s history: Last June, after acquiring a 6 percent stake in L3 Communications, Whitworth pushed for a breakup of that company. The result was the spinoff of a $2 billion unit that is to be called Engility.

Also in 2011, after amassing a stake of nearly 4 percent, Whitworth pushed for — and ultimately won — the breakup of the industrial conglomerate ITT. In that case, Whitworth threatened a nasty proxy fight by nominating himself and two other Relational officers to that company’s board. It ultimately broke itself into three publicly held pieces: ITT, ITT Excelis, and Xylem.

Whitworth’s latest target appears to be soft-drink giant PepsiCo. Having accumulated a stake amounting to about 0.6 percent of its shares outstanding, he is said to have agitated for the separation of its slow-growing beverage business from its faster-growing snacks line.

His biggest coup was at Home Depot, where he pushed the company to get out of the commercial building-supply business, which ultimately led to the resignation of then-CEO Robert Nardelli.

These examples of Whitworthiana are notable in light of J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz’s July 13 note to clients arguing that HP should indeed break up: As Barron’s noted that day, Moskowitz thinks HP will have to reinvest cost savings from the combination of its printer and PC divisions into the reengineering of its business model.

Moskowitz goes on: If HP’s strategic intent is to build up its enterprise IT solutions business, PCs and printers become less integral. Naturally, this brings to mind last August’s disastrous plan to spin off the PC-making personal systems group, a decision that, combined with the $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy, cost then-CEO Léo Apotheker his job.

Apotheker’s successor, Meg Whitman, quickly killed the spinoff plan after assuming the CEO slot, arguing that the PC business gives HP the scale it needs to compete effectively in other hardware businesses, including servers and printers. But given the growth prospects of both for the forseeable future, the pressure to carve HP up into parts will only grow.

But make no mistake: It’s an idea that Whitman firmly opposes: In a June 5 interview with AllThingsD, she reiterated her opinion that HP is strongest in its current sprawling form: Asked if she saw any scenario where a piece of HP was cut off from the whole, she was abundantly clear: “As I see it, everything stays,” she said at the time.

One has to wonder if, given his history of agitating for sweeping change at so many large and troubled companies, HP’s newest director and eighth-largest shareholder sees it in quite the same way.