That’s not to say that Chris didn’t make some very valid points; as we move to cloud-based services, the core performance of our cloud access device becomes much less of a factor in the user experience. But we are nowhere near that point yet, as Internet access speeds, bandwidth caps, and concerns about security and reliability are still issues that have yet to be fully addressed. And the user experience is largely defined by the software interface to the hardware, making software much more obvious to the user.

But hardware is the technology that enables all of the software excitement that users see, be it on a personal device or from a cloud service, and it is the continuing development of hardware technologies that grant software developers the opportunity to let their imagination run wild. I’m sure that looking back at our debate in just a few years will have us shaking our heads and wondering how we even considered that hardware innovation was no longer a major issue.

Chris and I did agree on a few points, though not 100%. We both feel that hardware innovation is alive and well in the datacenter, though he feels that there are still too many waste cycles due to the lack of software that can fully utilize even the current generations of multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs.  And we both strongly believe that the continued growth of mobile technologies and, to a certain extent, cloud utilization, by those mobile devices, is heavily dependent on hardware advances in the area of battery technology.

So take a look at the “Great Debate – Hardware: Does it really matter anymore?”  and weigh in with your opinions.

While worldwide shipments in the third-quarter grew by 7 percent year-on-year, revenue only increased by just over 5 percent year-on-year.

But while Dell grew 6.3 percent from 2010’s third-quarter, Oracle did not grow at all, remaining with a 4.7 percent marketshare, losing an estimated $25 million in revenue.

That said, the third-quarter was strong and the markets can enjoy profits back to nearly how they were before the global financial crisis hit in 2008.

While the markets appear healthy in the U.S. and Canada, predictions about Europe’s markets seemed hedgy at best; a wise decision considering the current turmoil in the European markets, where even the financiers do not know whether the single-market currency, the Euro, will be around this time next year.

IBM attained just shy of 30 percent worldwide server marketshare in the third-quarter, who marginally took the crown from HP with 29.3 percent of the marketshare. But IBM and HP were side-by-side in revenues collected, both accounting for $3.8 billion.

Looking at the figures by-unit, HP sold 694,000 servers, averaging out at a price of $5,500 each, with IBM selling nearly a third of that at 288,000, with an average market price of $13,000.

HP said its sales of industry standard servers — those running regular Intel chips — were down by around 4 percent, while its business critical servers — running Intel’s Itanium chips — were down by nearly a quarter. A significant drop, not helped by the ongoing ding with Oracle, where Oracle had said it would cease support of the Itanium chip because Intel did not plan to keep the platform alive ‘over the long run’.

European antitrust regulators are yet to respond to HP’s calls to investigate Oracle, as the spat reaches the next level.

Dell and Oracle grabbed a 15 percent and 6 percent marketshare respectively in the last quarter.