Christine; The prices are due to the following.
1 Memory has crashed due to huge overproduction.
2 The CPU price has crashed because AMD.CYRIX and others have made chips that run "gatescode" as fast or better than Intel. Intel is dropping prices as a 'fire barrier' strategy to deny share to AMD etc.
Since AMD is so small, when Intel drops prices to chop $5 profits from AMD it costs Intel $100 in lost Intel profits. That is the fire sale model. AMD must be prevented from getting share at all costs. AMD has the momentum to overtake Intel if it is allowed to have a few quarters of high margin CPU sales.
3 The price of hard drives due to new heads has dropped by over tenfold in the last few years
4 Integration of chips has allowed peripheral cards to also drop ten fold in cost.
These factors have placed an office computer in the $1000 area. It has also made the NC doable at a few hundred dollars.
I can see a windows NC, with the operating system in ROMS. Only the variable boot parameters need to change, and they can have a battery backup static ram part(and also central system backup) This would allow a fast boot, with no large downloads of OS to get it going. Only data would flow. No disks needed, just enough cheap DRAM to deal with the tasks at hand, which would allow them to be as fast as a JAVA ap solution. Of course with Java on Roms, it will still be faster, so I guess we will have to see what the market buys.
In addition, we are entering an era when Intel may become more redundant than Microsoft. Any CPU that runs microsoft code(Gatescode) will sell, and that means any non intel system. In addition any code that runs on one of those cpus that also runs a rewritten gatescode app will get share.
So you could have ten different non compatible cpus, all of which run Java and all run what are now windows apps written in gatescode.
The barrier is the scarcity of Java apps that are direct run clones of windows apps, and the scarcity of Winjava, a windows visually operating system written in Java for all the cpus.
So Gates need have no great fear of a rapid loss, however there will be an incremental growth of the others, and in time their total might be greater than his total. (and down goes the share price, and BG is just a common billionaire again)
He can act to kill them by lowball pricing, like Intel with AMD.
Bill |
