This IDC study examines the U.S., international, and worldwide markets for traditional Unix workstations and Windows personal workstations for calendar-year 2006. The workstation market is growing at double-digit rates, and the outlook is bright for the few vendors that compete in this space. Different classes of the workstation business had dramatically different results. The traditional workstation (TWS) space continued to decline in 2006 and will continue to decline going forward. A market that was once measured in billions of dollars is now measured in millions of dollars. TWS revenue dropped from $1.9 billion in 2002 to only $349.6 million in 2006. From 2005 to 2006 alone, there was a drop of $188 million in revenue. The PWS class, on the other hand, has continued to grow and is forecast to continue to grow in both units and revenue. Revenue has increased from $2.8 billion in 2002 to $4.8 billion in 2006.

"Users are migrating away from traditional workstations and moving to personal workstations. The large growth area is anticipated to be in the mobile workstation space moving forward, as the performance in these mobile workstations has finally reached desktop performance. The introduction of duo-core and quad-core technology will only improve the performance of mobile workstations, adding to the growth rate," said Lloyd Cohen, research director of IDC's Enterprise Server Technologies group.