Bill,
Really, sometimes you have to question who these 'experts' are. This Dataquest prediction was obsolete before they made it. There are still 60+ clone makers.
1) although I had my doubts about the wisdom of abandoning the CHRP platform (Motorola), it seems that Umax and Apple will sell these machines. It further seems Umax deserved it. There is some wierd stuff going on here. I was wondering why Apple's buss systems were lagging but obviously they have alternate ideas which are promising. SGI has also developed a very fast buss architecture.
2) IBM's copper announcement
Taken together with the development of linier and backside cache, new types of memory chips, OS developement, Raid arrays, embedded chips networked to god knows whatever. I don't see any of the major computermakers going anywhere. Mutating perhaps but not gone.
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Thin client machines are for business networks folks, not necessarily for consumers. Also even if the profit margins for the hardware is small, software subscriptions will have higher margins since the software will be sold on a per use basis. For instance: my brother doesn't need to spend $600 on photoshop to design his business card. Just $35 on a java applet that has a one month expiration.
Also, he will rent space on a ISP hard drive.
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The reason I'm interested in the leanness and speed of the OSs is because us renderers need all the speed of the PROCESSOR that we can get, even if you max out on Ram, if you set up your OS right you gain significant %s of efficientcy. This will become more and more important to home workstation users in the TV, Movie and Internet content industries.
Not to mention, 3D holographic animation is on the horizon.
Doren |
