<<Great post, Scott. Do you have a guess when the next high-end PC upgrade cycle will begin?>>
If you don't mind I'll hazard a guess on that.
Domestically, the current cycle hasn't ended yet, but has to be getting close. A mid-range to upper-mid Pentium box on a Win '95 or Win NT platform handles most activities in a typical large corporate environment. It is reasonable to expect that this current cycle will be at different stages in other parts of the world.
Until new bandwidth intensive applications arrive at the desktop, there will be little need to upgrade these boxes enmasse, beyond replacement purchase levels.
The internet is a major source for these bandwidth intensive applications to the desktop, particularly when E-commerce really takes off. Others would be VPNs with Video conferencing, multimedia E-Mail, FAX to the desktop, etc.
Before Corporations will really open their pocketbooks for more powerful and capable PCs, they have to upgrade their networks significantly. Intel knows this, which IMO is a major reason they are moving into enterprise networking. But before corporations will benefit from doing this, the Internet core infrastructure has to speed up to accomodate the greater bandwidth that this will require. We see this core infrastructure upgrades beginning to occur now. My guess is the Enterprise network upgrade cycle will lag this core Infrastructure cycle by a year or so, and the next PC upgrade cycle will lag that by a year or so.
Just my thoughts.
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