IDC says that mobile, handheld computers - meaning tablets and smartphones - will officially join the mainstream in 2011 and start to push PCs into the background. The firm's statistical definition of "mainstream" is when a technology surpasses 15 percent of the market, and IDC predicts that more than 1 billion regular Internet users (roughly 50 percent of the market) will be accessing the Web on mobile devices in the next year.
The business use of cloud computing will also go mainstream in 2011, says IDC. This, too, should come as no surprise to anyone exposed to the recent cloud technology campaigns from Microsoft, IBM, Google and many others, but IDC went so far as to predict that 80 percent of new software in 2011 will be available as cloud services.