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When the bullet hits the bone... Microsoft vs. Intel #1 Hardware vs. Software *TECHNOLOGY LIMITS* As it stands now,the PC industry is dominated by "Wintel". Microsoft on the software side and Intel on hardware's end. Two dragons of equally lethal power. But as I see it,the hardware side is coming up against a wall. Right from the cpu on down to the modem, floppy disk, CD-ROM, DVD etc., hardware technologies are slowing down in their progress forward. Take the modem for example, the telephone modem is pretty well maxed out at 56K. POTS won't allow for for much more so why would modem makers spend any more money to develop in that direction. The modem will be like the floppy drive (a brand-nameless peripheral) that is included with the basic PC and has no marketing cache at all. The floppy disk, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM should eventually merge as DVD-RAM. This could take quite a few years though. Specification wars could delay things indefinitely. Lets hope this isn't the case. The graphics and sound cards will also no doubt improve over the years. High level 3-D graphics and wavetable sound should be available in all PCs soon. After these become widespread I don't see upgrading to higher levels as being neccessary. It might be desirable, but neccessary, no. We've made due with 2-D and 16 bit cards for forever and a day. The cpu has made impressive gains for 25 years and will continue for the fore-seeable future. Even now though one can see the gains slowing. Taking the cpu down to .25micron architecture and smaller becomes more and more expensive and risky.No doubt there won't be too many companies taking on the job of trying to out design Intel with the huge cost of entry to the market. IN THE END HARDWARE HITS A WALL. From the telephone to the car or tv set one sees the slowing of product growth. The value added comes in the form of content or features, the "soft" side of things. For example, call waiting for the phone or specialty channels for tv. Anything extra on the hardware end is overkill. Ex: like adding stereo speakers to phones instead of a single earpiece. People don't see the sense in having great sound when using the phone so they won't pay for the feature. Result is the disappearance of ''stereo phones ''from the marketplace.People find a natural level of satisfaction vs. price paid. THE SOFTWARE SIDE HAS NO LIMIT TO HOW FAR IT CAN GO. Microsoft could make small improvements and add them little by little in "patches". The features don't have major things at all, just refinements. The patches could be free or for a very small fee. This gives a great advantage in case major changes to strategy come about. The best example was the addition of the browser to the O/S. Result was an endplay to Netscape's Navigator. Intel could never do something as quickly to counter AMD or Cyrix. The best that it could do would be to lower prices ASAP(Intel did). Even then AMD wouldn't be endplayed as Netscape was. Microsoft is already into the content side with MSN and Comcast and all the other software games etc. and they don't seem to be slowing down. I'm surprised that Intel hasn't touched software at all! Let's hope that both Intel and Microsoft don't hit the wall soon. Definite advantage to Microsoft for now. | ||||||||||||
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