Wonder If There Were No… (Fill In The Blank)
- 4
- Add a Comment
I was reading one of those doom and gloom articles about AMD this morning and wondered to myself, wonder if there were no AMD? Give it some thought for a moment. What pricing would Intel be charging for their chips if they were the only player in town? Do you think we would be at Quad core processing today if Intel didn’t want us to be? I doubt it.
How about Microsoft and Windows. Many complain about Vista but there are other options available. But wonder if there was no Apple, no Linux or other open source competitors? How much would Windows than cost us? Over at the OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] web site, I read an article about OLPC using Windows XP on their systems. The writers opinion was that by doing this it would be beneficial since it would be a good comparison on which to gauge the Linux system known as Sugar against. This person knew it would be a tough sell if OLPC only had one offering with nothing to compare it to.
Would we have laptop computers selling for $399 if it weren’t for competition in the market place? Increased sales that have reduced the cost of computer parts where 1 G of RAM is now selling on some sites for only $23.99 or less. Could you imagine if only one company, say Dell, was the only game in town and there were no others? Would prices be this cheap?
Take all of the above into consideration and picture this. You sitting at your New $1500 Dell system with a Intel P3 processor, using Windows 95 w/ SP 14 on a 56k dialup connection in the year 2008. Doesn’t sound like any fun to me!
Comments welcome.
Tags: microsoft, windows, dell, intel, olpc, linux, pricing, vista
4 Comments
marc klink
October 30th, 2007
at 7:29am
Someone would have stepped up, it is the nature of man to take down a peg or two, any one or thing perceived too large.
If there was no AMD, perhaps TransMeta would be the number 2, or perhaps IBM with the Power chips. As it stands, the most powerful air-cooled chip available is not an Intel model - it is a Power 6 chip, which is quad core and can run with a simple heat sink at 4.1 GHz - clearly IBM has solved the current leakage problems that Intel is just now solving. I tend to wonder how much Intel is paying IBM to NOT produce the Power6 in large volume, or in a form factor that could challenge x86..
Anyway, the point is that something will always fill the void. As nVidia did when S3 and 3dfx went down the drain. ATi was not left unchallenged (thank goodness) for very long at all.
Mike
October 30th, 2007
at 9:37am
Wow! Fourteen service packs, that would sure do a good job filling the 8 gig hard drive that comes with that $1500 Dell…lol.
Scott King
October 30th, 2007
at 5:20pm
I came across a old issue of PC World, just when the “new” 486 processors came out. I got a good laugh at the prices-$4500! for the top of the line. We are indeed fortunate nowadays.
Ron Schenone
October 30th, 2007
at 6:18pm
Hi Marc,
i sure someone would of took the place of the big boys.
Mike,
I was thinking of two 8G drives. One for the OS, the other for the service packs!
Hi Scott,
$4500 ! We have seen some price improvements over the years.