9. The enterprise sector
While everyone has been suffering thanks to the myopia of banks and governments, PC sales have managed to hold-up remarkably well. This is entirely down to consumers, however, as businesses slammed their wallets firmly shut as the start of 2009 and kept them that way all year.
The hope for the PC industry next year is that enterprise snaps out of it and decides to start investing once more. A lot of the kit out there must be getting pretty long in the tooth and there has got to be some decent ROI available for those brave enough to take the plunge.
Apart from the need to replace aging kit, it will be hoped that Windows 7 provides an incentive for businesses to invest. Enterprise on the whole turned its nose up at Vista, but Windows 7 has been pretty well received. 2010 could be the year that many decide it's time for a wholesale upgrade.
Another driver for business will be cloud computing and the exponential growth of the Internet in general. All this online activity needs to be done somewhere and server farms are starting to rival actual farms in their scale. That adds up to a hell of a lot of kit, and while virtualization technologies will continue to optimise its productivity, there should still be a lot of demand for servers.
