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To: Jeff Fox who wrote (75636)3/7/1999 10:08:00 AM
From: gnuman  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 186894
 
Jeff, re: "I think it could be reached by 2010??"
Look at it this way, that's the equivalent of 1/6 th of every man woman and child on earth having a "connected PC." Or about 2/3 of world wide households/family units being "connected." (Current world population is 5.97 billion).
When you consider that only 2.5% of the world population is currently connected, (per Global Internet statistics), it's difficult to imagine even 1 billion PCs by 2010, much less "connected Pcs".
At your suggestion I ran some "what if" spread sheets that showed 1 billion PCs by 2008. Used 10% annual growth in PC ships with an arbitrary attrition of older units. The problem with that model is it disregards demographics.
One of the key factors in growth has to be affordability. Not only of the PC but of the connection. (And the availability of connection). To reach the ROW, (the first penetration was the easiest), prices need to come down dramatically, which I'm sure they will. Median incomes are significantly below the current owners.
This looks like a "catch 22" to me.
To reach these numbers it seems we must experience significantly declining PC prices to foster unit growth. In one model I have 170 million PCs shipped in 2008 at an ASP of $300. Probably not an unreasonable assumption for 2008. But that's a crummy $51 billion PC business. (Less than half of 1998). And the semi content is minuscule.
But isn't that the nature of a commodity business?



To: Jeff Fox who wrote (75636)3/7/1999 11:21:00 AM
From: Tony Viola  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 186894
 
Jeff, re "You might start
thinking now about what you can do with your new 50 gigahertz processor with its
1Gbps fibre net connection . This is likely to be the typical machine of 2010!"

I assume you followed Moore's Law with this. Also, didn't Dr. Moore say everything looked fine for the continuation of his law until 2013? I forget what, if anything, he said might run his law into the wall then.

In the nearer term, re net connection speed, have you seen any predictions on ramping of this? For example, when will 1 Mbps or so cable modem or other vast improvement to our 28.8, 56K, get to significant saturation levels? One data point on the curve: my son in San Jose has been on At Home's list for cable modem hookup a good three months now. Slooowww. Of course, faster net connections go a long way in justifying Intel's faster and faster CPU speeds.

Regards,

Tony