Last week I wrote about Deloitte's prediction that PC sales will be overtaken by sales of smartphones, tablets and non-PC netbooks in 2011. On Information Week recently, Bob Evans wrote about the end of the PC's dominance and the rise of the iPad and consumer-written apps. His colleague, Alex Wolfe, wrote that "desktops and laptops, as a mode of user engagement are the past, not the future."

 

With some 43 million iPads predicted to sell this year (up from 14 million predicted just six months ago), how will CIOs and IT departments navigate this latest sweeping change in user's technology preferences?

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu has just released its tenth annual Predictions for the next 12-to-18 months. Here are three of the key findings they say will impact the Enterprise:

 

• More than half of computing devices sold globally will not be PCs; smartphones, tablets and non-PC netbooks will outsell PCs. What does this mean for IT departments? Deloitte says, "The cost of managing a mixed network of both PCs and non-PCs is likely to be much higher than standardizing on one or the other." In this fragmented world, software and hardware will "likely require more customization, and developers may need to pick and choose which platforms they develop for, knowing that they cannot afford to address all markets simultaneously," Deloitte says.

 

The PC is taking its last breaths, if you believe Google executive John Herlihy.

"In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant," Herily, Google's VP of global ad operations, told attendees at the Digital Landscapes conference in Dublin Wednesday, according to Irish tech site siliconrepublic.com. "In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs."

The future of the PC market is undergoing rapid change. A new report from Bain & Co. asks if PCs in the Enterprise will be reinvented or just die out. The future for makers of traditional personal computers is uncertain, the report notes, as users shift to smartphones and netbooks linked through high-speed broadband and cloud computing.

 

Microsoft's new operating system is off to a quick start, with first-week sales outpacing Vista's by 234 percent, according to research firm NPD Group. Unfortunately for PC makers, they haven't enjoyed similar success.

"Microsoft's program of early low-cost pre-sales, high-visibility marketing and aggressive deals helped make the Windows 7 software launch successful," said Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement. "In a slow environment for packaged software, Windows 7 brought a large number of customers into the software aisles."