PC Makers Hit Speed Bumps; Being Faster May Not Matter
So far the response of the personal computer industry to its worst decline in history has largely been one of denial.
“People are walking around like members of the cargo cult after World War II,” said Mark Resch, a partner at Onomy Labs, a Palo Alto, Calif., technology consulting firm. “They’re just hoping the planes come back.”
This article reinforces what many have been saying for years: you don’t need a lot of MHz to read email and surf the web. Once you reach the point where increased speed doesn’t deliver anything (and I would suggest this is south of the 1 GHz level), bandwidth adds more value. And once you have some reliable broadband connection, you really don’t more PC hardware. Maybe better quality audio and video, but no more expensive upgrades to your computer itself, no more licenses for word processors and spreadsheets that, for all their new features, don’t make things any easier this year than last year or the year before that.
I’ve thought for years the PC industry was getting a pretty good deal: they could crank out dull-looking beige boxes, year after year, with the same crummy issues with cabling and peripherals, the same unfriendly form factors, and all for a healthy margin and reliable growth rates.
If you have ever opened a desktop PC and seen how small the actual board is, you can’t help but wonder why the case has to be so big, why it can’t be made to fit into more places instead of dominating one’s desk or taking half the legroom under it. PC makers relied on the chipmakers to stimulate demand with faster chips, software makers relied on faster chips and new hardware sales to drive upgrades, and now they have to figure out what to do next.
Good thing some folks can imagine a future without the beige boat anchor:
In the midst of a general computing and chip-making downturn, ARM Holdings, a British company that is the world’s largest designer of microprocessors for consumer devices like cellphones and personal digital assistants, is experiencing record growth.
ARM chips are designed for the new world of computing away from the desktop PC. This year, there are 1.3 billion ARM microprocessors in cellphones, personal digital assistants and other consumer devices — for the first time exceeding the one billion personal computers that have been produced.
“There is tremendous growth in all the little things that help life,” said John Rayfield, an ARM vice president based in Los Gatos, Calif. “Centralizing them all in one large computer makes no sense.”