The Economist: The End Of Wintel THEY were the Macbeths of information technology (IT): a wicked couple who seized power and abused it in bloody and avaricious ways. ...... the two firms’ supposed love of monopoly profits and dead rivals. ..... increasingly seen as yesterday’s tyrants. Rumours persist that a coup is brewing to oust Steve Ballmer ..... “Intel Architecture”, the set of rules governing how software interacts with the processor it runs on. ..... the Wintel marriage is crumbling. ...... The Wintel marriage is now threatened, oddly enough, by technological progress. Processors grow ever smaller and more powerful; internet and wireless connections keep speeding up. This has created both centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are pushing computing into data centres (huge warehouses full of servers) and onto mobile devices— ...... The shift to mobile computing and data centres (also known as “cloud computing”) has speeded up the “verticalisation” of the IT industry. ...... now firms are becoming more vertically integrated. ...... Apple .. is building a huge data centre ....... Having lost its battle with the European Commission, for instance, Microsoft must now give Windows users in the European Union a choice of which web browser to install. ...... Microsoft has made big bets on cloud computing. It has already built a global network of data centres and developed an operating system in the cloud called Azure. The firm has put many of its own applications online, even Office, albeit with few features. What is more, Microsoft has made peace with the antitrust authorities and even largely embraced open standards. ....... Microsoft’s mobile business is in disarray. ...... in tablet computers, Microsoft is behind, too ..... Paul Otellini .. is pinning his hopes on a new family of processors called Atom. Rather than making these chips ever more powerful, Intel is making them ever cheaper and less power-hungry ....... ARM’s chips guzzle little power and cost much less than Intel’s, because its licensing fees are low and most customers use foundries (contract chipmakers) to make them. .... Intel’s position seems safe as long as Moore’s Law holds ..... Microsoft has yet to deliver a competitive version of Windows for smart-phones and tablets ..... Meego, an open-source operating system for mobile devices. Microsoft, by cuddling up to ARM, will be able to build chips of its own. ..... Oracle, Cisco and IBM will vie for corporate customers; Apple and Google will scramble for individuals (see table). IT, like the world, is becoming multipolar.
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Bill Gates once said, success is a lousy teacher. But that does not explain it fully, or even a big part of it. This is about the tectonic forces in innovation, in technology. This is ultimately about hurricane size clouds.
The big company of one era does not end up also being the big company of another era. That is the nature of the beast.
Wintel was a PC era marriage. And the PC era has been ending for a while now. You end up facing a classic problem. How do you lose your love for the big revenue sources and go for the little innovative products that might (or might not) become big tomorrow, but if they become big, they will become big by eating into your current big products? No wonder it is almost always some outsider doing that munching and crunching.
As IT fans out into ever larger data centers and ever more powerful mobile devices, we have entered the era of welcome fragmentation. The PC used to be the center of the computing universe. The PC will still be around, but it will be just one creature in the vast tech ecosystem. It will be just one galaxy in the tech universe.
Like is supposed to happen in functional capitalism: the consumer wins.
The Economist
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