Word: pc
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going to get top marks? Microsoft's argument was basically a reprise of their show-and-tell in the courtroom last week: remove Internet Explorer from Windows 95, they warned, and you get a crippled PC. The government's paper, if nothing else, was more passionate: "Microsoft construed the preliminary injunction to require what it knew would be a senseless result," it wrote. The software firm has not exactly been teacher's pet in this trial, and the government's simple argument ? that all they had to do to comply was run the "Add/Remove" program ? could well land...
Intel has ceased being just a Silicon Valley wonder. It has become a weather vane for an entire digital economy, a complete ecosystem of drive manufacturers, software houses and Web programmers whose businesses depend on escalating PC growth. Because Grove and his firm control the blueprints of the PC, he is in the unique position of being able to tell customers what to do. Intel sets release dates for new chips, dictating the pace of the computer industry with the confident aplomb of fashion designers raising or lowering hemlines. It's the sort of ironfisted market grip that rarely exists...
...points out a few years. The resulting line, he saw, showed that chip power doubled roughly every 24 months, even as costs fell by half. The rule (amended to 18 months) became known as Moore's law. Though it frustrates consumers--it's the reason that $2,500 PC you bought will be obsolete in a year--the law has given Intel a road map, allowing the company to shift resources ahead of demand rather than jumping crazily after the fact...
...jarring reality pretty much across the tech board. Success breeds imitators. Imitators flood the market with goods. Prices (and profits) come down. Again, take Intel. It supplies nearly 90% of the microprocessors in PCs worldwide--a more commanding grip than even Microsoft's stranglehold on PC operating systems. But to protect its position, Intel has cut semiconductor prices faster than anyone expected as rivals Cyrix and Advanced Micro Devices compete furiously to supply cheaper components for the $1,000 PCs now taking the world by storm. Intel's profit margin has eroded from nearly 63% a year...
...theory went like this: as the price of whiz-bang computers falls, demand will rise even faster. Looks like the theory was actually right. By autumn PC makers from Compaq to Hewlett-Packard to IBM were offering robust multimedia machines for less than $1,000--and nearly a third of all new PCs sold fell into that range...