>>Mark Campbell wrote:
>Harry Landsieldel wrote:
>>Re: "The troubling aspect of Intel (as with almost any company)
>>is what the ***NEW*** strategy will be when this one wears out."
>I am willing to bet that someone asked this same question about
>the "internal combustion engine" in about 1920.
A slightly more apt analogy, since I wasn't debating microprocessors as a general class, is whether someone asked this question about Ford Motor Company after their first few years of success. Wait a minute -- we know the answer -- the answer was that GM thought about it and then beat Ford soundly in delivering cars.
>To me Intel's dominance of the microprocessor market is as
>much economic and marketing as it is technical. And that part
>has been missed by Wall Street. When a fab costs upwards
>to $2.5 billion and marketing "partners" have spent $2 billion
>on the "Intel inside" campaign in the past few years, those
>are mighty big barriers to entry. Don't you think?
Yes...as I've stated before in this newsgroup, I believe that Intel's marketing and fabrication capabilities are formidable. And I'm not worried about someone trying to play by Intel's rules and beat Intel -- AMD and Cyrix don't keep me up at night (I am a long-term Intel shareholder).
But someone changing the rules does keep me up at night. If you look at Intel's vision statement, PC ubiquity and all of that seem to be the right vision. The problem as I see it is that the PC as currently defined has a PAM (product available market) of 40%-60% (depending on who you believe) when in fact Intel understands that "ubiquity" really means that you need a PAM of 100% (you'll never reach your PAM, but you can come closer if your product addresses the needs).
As I've stated earlier, I like and admire Intel. But in my opinion Andy Grove needs to quit talking so much about why the NC sucks (I agree it sucks, by the way) and more about what his vision is to build something that addresses much more of the market.
The NC started off its life as something that was going to sell into home and business and replace the PC. It's now been forced into a niche where it's pretty indistinguishable from the X-terminal. That doesn't mean the original concept of the NC wasn't right, it just means that the folks trying to build an affordable computing device couldn't figure out a way to do it and thus punted to the abomination that the NC is defined as today.
To win, and win big (whereby Intel shares increase 10X or more), Intel is going to have to crack this, first in the U.S. and then around the world.
Anyway -- that's just my opinion,
Mark |
