Here are a couple of scenarios.
1) The use of the "B-List". If INTC uses antitrust behavior to punish OEM's and others who try to introduce competing technologies, INTC will likely be in violation of the (Sherman?) antitrust act. In that case the JD will come in and slap INTC's wrists, various chip producers will sue for huge sums of money based on lost profits, etc. and will receive treble damages.
2) Errors in judgement and missteps: ANy company can fall prey to them, and most companies must commit them. They are essentially the results of attempts to predict the future which is always an uncertain enterprise. However, to some extent, INTC has some power in determining what that future will be, - an enviable position to be in. Two examples of missteps, 32-bit optimized code for the P-6 while MS produces Win95 with 16 bit FAT's and other 16 bit code. MMX, while trumpted to be the next savior, is only 10-20% faster than equivalent INTC P5 mhz chips. Cyrix is already that fast in the non MMX version, and they haven't even introduced their MMX version. BTW, I was referring to DEC's claim on the "mini-computer" market, the PDP/ VAX machines which, for awhile, competed well against the mainframes. DEC seemed to own that market, much like INTC owns the microprocessor market. They just couldn't get out of their own parochial view that they could extend the VAX architecture, and succeed, and try to ignore the PC.
The biggest threat to INTC isn't, IMHO these two foregoing items. I think it is in A) competition to their current technology from lower price producers, and B) technology they are not even aware exists which could again revolutionize the information game, and leave INTC holding a lot of equipment and fabs, and old perspectives (much like DEC). The old buggy whip problem. Is INTC likely to miss this boat? Maybe, because it is inherently in the nature of normal science, and normal corporate development, to go along the path of the development of a product that was once revolutionary, but now has become evolutionary, by pouring more and more resources into that evolutionary technology. Example: Today the speed of microprocessors is measured in mips and mflops. That is millions of instructions per second. A good chip/machine will hope to increase th current standard by 5 to 10 fold. That is going from say 10 miilion instructions per second to 50 - 100 million. That is blazing speed by conventional standards. But what would you think if someone told you that today there is a company that has developed and demonstrated a technology that can run instructions at tera flop speed, trillions of floating point operations per second!! That increases the speed by 1000 to 10,000 times of the current, most state of the art, machine. You might be amazed, and you might say well that is interesting, but because they don't have a current commercial product you might rightfully note the difficulties of bringing such a technology to market. However, someone, or more than just one, is out there right now with the seeds of the next revolution, just like a 17 yo Bill Gates was "out there" back in 1972 hatching his own visionary plan to alter the landscape of the way everyone uses computers. Back in 1972 who would have given any credence to Gates vision. Not many. So the danger to INTC's hegemony is the paradigm shift, something they can't see, and can't anticipate, unless by some chance, they happen to have the Bill Gates of the 2010's working in one of their departments. Which I doubt, because the odds would not be in the favor of such a coincidence, and most such geniuses aren't found in conventional corporations.
BTW, there is such a company that has demonstrated solving a math problem in a few seconds that took a Sun Sparc station 16 hours to complete! They also are developing a commercial technology which reaches teraflop speed. |
