<!--For one thing, the PC is far from saturation. In the US, PC has penetrate only 40% of the family, and not to mention many families are still owning their 386 systems, and this is based on the assumption that every family has only one PC. What if every family has more than one PCs, like the TVs ? This is just about US, then what about the world market ? -->
I agree that the PC market is nowhere near saturated in the US, but I think this has a lot to do with the fact that most people who really want a PC have one. There are others who can get one that don't really want one. And then you have the have-nots who really couldn't afford one if they tried. Relative to historical pricing, $1000 is cheap for a PC (monitor included), but you have to look at what else $1000 can buy. In my case, that's two months rent and car insurance (I'm under 21 so it's rather high).
<!--What will be the next driving force for PC industry ? The answer is Real time video.
It means 30 frames per second at least have to be displayed , which means compression and decompression of millions bits of data per second, which also
means power of CPUs.-->
To a certain extent this is correct, but I think real-time video is much more important for business users than home users. If the game industry is a proper example, simulated reality is going to be much more important than video. Movies, IRC, MUD's and MOO's are all means of escaping from reality. Real-time video is of limited use in the last 3 of those entertainment applications. Only home use for RTV that I believe would be popular is communicating with family and friends. With the breakup of the family unit and the advent of online communities, pretty soon we won't have real family OR friends. *smirk*
<!--Can you imagine in the future , four people , in Asia, Europe, US, and Africa, held a real time conference on the PCs, just like they are face to face with each other? -->
Please man, in 2 of those 4 countries you named the vast majority of the populations are dirt poor. I think they have other things on their minds besides videoconferencing with their relatives in the US and Europe who are working minimum wage jobs to take care of their families back home. If we want real growth in the PC industry, we need to expand wealth.
<!--What if CPQ places all its Alpha chip in the PC and sells it as a regular PC in the future, the future PC needs much more CPU powers, it is not just used for word processing. The CPU needs a power of more than 1 giga Hrz per second for video play. -->
What if the 50lbs of plutonium on the galileo probe manages to ignite jupiter? The market could go into a tailspin and I'd lose my investment, not to mention my father would loose his retirement. Seriously though, I watch DVD video on 350Mhz Pentium II's. I'm not sure what level of processing power is needed for MPEG2 video compression, but we've achieved software decompression on the desktop without ASICS. We don't even use the full available processing power of the available Pentium II's. It's a bit too early to start talking about putting Alphas, which are approximately 50% faster with native 32 bit code and 100% faster with native 64 bit code than Intel chips, on the desktop. First we need to focus on expanding the bandwidth available to the typical home user. ADSL is a good start, but those damn government sanctioned monopolies (the RBOC's) are really dragging their feet.
<!--Who will be the driving force for the above good things ? Microsoft. Just look at what new features are included in the recently released WIN 98. How about Win 99, 2000 ....etc ? -->
Microsoft a driving force for good things? I don't think so. A driving force for standardization, but not innovation like Bill Gates would have you believe. Win98 has almost no worthwhile new features. Even MS admits it's an incremental upgrade. Remember how all the industry mags kept saying that win95 has almost caught up...and in some cases surpassed MacOS? I suspect that's the reason win98 is such a weak upgrade. Nothing new to clone. I remember before communicator came out, Netscape was talking about making the browser the interface to the web AND the local PC. Gee, I wonder if that had anything to do with Microsoft intergrating IE into windows. The next big thing for Win9x is an NT based kernel which I'm looking to as a definite improvement for reasons of stability and robustness.
Here's a question. What happens to desktop and consumer boxes after Merced? That chip is geared for high end servers and workstations, but what about portables and desktops for everyone else?
-jgh |
