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The end of Wintel

53 points| ab9 | 15 years ago |economist.com | reply

28 comments

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[+] lolipop1|15 years ago|reply
The author seems to generalize the "market" here. The effects described on the markets are/willbe much more subtle than the article claims. IT has always been multi-faceted. It's not like MS, Intel, Oracle, IBM or Cisco could have stopped doing marketing and still be where they are.
[+] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
There's a good joke about that, it goes like this:

A man is seated next to Bill Gates in the business class of an airplane. Mr. Gates, he asks, how come that with your name and brand recognition and your tremendous turnover as well as the locked-in nature of your customers that you still spend money on advertising.

Gates replies: Do you like the speed at which this aircraft is travelling ? How about we turn the engines off ?

[+] Tamerlin|15 years ago|reply
That's true, but the author is looking at what's under the hood -- at the moment, ALL of those companies are heavily depending on Microsoft and/or Intel. In most cases, both.

Example -- IBM is still one of Intel's biggest server OEM's. And most of IBM's corporate environment runs in Windows. (For that matter, the same could be said for most of the bloated US Federal government.)

The author is also ignoring the fact that the Wintel duopoly has been making inroads in corporate markets, as well -- for years now Intel has pretty much owned the low and mid-range server markets, and is making inroads on higher end markets (in fact, the only thing that so far has been able to hurt Itanium meaingfully is... Xeon), and due largely to SQL Server, Microsoft has been making large inroads into those markets also.

Apple's growth in the PC market isn't harming Intel one bit -- quite the opposite in fact, because Apple's success is tied to Intel.

I don't think Intel's dominance is in any danger. Microsoft's is another story -- Intel will be able to gain a lot of mobile market share, because Intel has the best semiconductor manufacturing in the business.

That said, I think that ARM will be a tougher competitor than AMD, because ARM is already much, much bigger, and some the foundries making ARM processors for their partners are larger than Intel, even if they aren't quite as high-tech.

The declining margins in processors are probably why Intel's been going after the graphics market, the cluster-on-a-chip market (Larrabee), and doing the whole-system thing for the mobile market, rather than just the Atom chip by itself.

[+] Raphael|15 years ago|reply
AMD designed the 64-bit architecture.
[+] Cabal|15 years ago|reply
AMD designed a 64-bit architecture. There were many 64-bit architectures around long before x86-64 in 2000.