Citing its new report "Worldwide PC Adoption Forecast, 2007 To 2015", the technology research firm said there would be more than one billion PCs in use by the end of 2008, while a rapid growth in emerging markets and expansion into the untapped markets would take the numbers to over two billion by 2015.
Incidentally, the World Bank expects the world population to rise to seven billion by 2015, which simply means that on an average every two out of seven people would use a PC in the next eight years. Forrester said that the four emerging markets - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - would account for more than 775 million new PCs by 2015.
In India, the total number of PCs has already crossed 22 million mark at the end of March 2007, suggesting one PC for approximately every 50 Indians, according to IT research firm IDC India. While it took 27 years to reach the one billion PCs mark, Forrester said it would take only five years to reach the next billion, due to advancing technology, lower prices and global demand on the part of a technology-aware population.
"There is nothing more important to the long-term health of the technology industry - and personal technology in particular - than the ability to deliver relevant, accessible and affordable technology to the billions of people worldwide who have not been exposed to it," Forrester Research vice president and research director Simon Yates said.
The industry can probably survive selling incrementally better hardware and software to the people who already have technology in their lives, but the vast majority of growth in the PC and related industries would come from emerging markets, Yates added.
However, vendors used to the predictability of buyers in mature markets cannot gauge demand in the emerging markets making the high volume launches risky. In an emerging market, vendors do not have the luxury of introducing products on a small scale to test the market before going into full production as the economics forces a supplier to focus on bringing volume to market more quickly at much greater risk.
"There are risks...It is safe to assume that life cycles will be longer in emerging markets. Vendors, will need to have a deep understanding of how to work in these markets and... would need to band together to scale production for these emerging regions," Yates said.
The Forrester report also noted the efforts of Microsoft Unlimited Potential, the Intel World Ahead Program, AMD 50x15, and OLPC for reaching untapped markets. But the report said that other major system vendors need to get involved and demonstrate similar efforts for the PC industry to scale production enough to ship five times more at one-fifth the cost.
This would arm the emerging markets with the low-cost product required for the PC market to take off.
