Sub-laptop portable computers and peripherals, now more than doubling in size as a market every year, will balloon to over $10,000m next year and $50,000m by 1998 from $3,500m in 1991 worldwide – compound annual growth rates approaching 50%, reckons Mountain View, California-based Market Intelligence Inc. Market Intelligence is one of those outfits that forecast unit and value sales for five and 10 years out to remarkable precision – 74.1m machines worth $54,420m in 1998 for instance, and in that context it should be remembered that back in 1981, when IBM launched the original IBM Personal Computer, Dataquest forecast that IBM might be doing $800m a year in personal computers by 1984 or 1985: in the event, by the mid-1980s, IBM’s personal computer sales were running at five billion dollars. The firm reckons that the US share of the world market will decline from 64% in 1991 to 52% by 1998 while Europe grows from only 10% to 18%. Pen computers will be the fastest-growing segment from a very small base, with a nearly 85% compound annual growth rate worldwide through 1998, and the concepts of pen computing will increasingly be integrated into every level of personal computing, the company reckons, without putting an absolute number on it – but some will be cautious about that forecast: success is likely to depend significantly on whether the algorithms for reading cursive handwriting are proven to work in practice: if not, the whole area could prove as big a disappointment as the Tandy Corp Model 100 was to Tandy. The machine received rave reviews from journalists in all the papers because it was just what journalists’ needed, and Tandy ordered accordingly from Kyorcera Corp – but once all the journalists that wanted one had bought it, sales dried up: no-one else had the same need, and it was to be another five years before notepad computers started to sell, with MS-DOS machines far more powerful than the Z80-based Model 100, which wasn’t compatible with anything.The report, $1,500, was not received for review.
