Word: pcs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...notoriously slow to promote women executives--only 7% of top officers at FORTUNE 500 tech firms are female. But in this business where brand and the CEO become interchangeable--think of Microsoft's Bill Gates and Dell's Michael Dell--Fiorina's gender may actually become an advantage. In PCs, where HP faces increasing competition, products are becoming more commodity-like and prices are falling. Now, HP's gray boxes, in part because of Fiorina's gender, will have just a little bit more cachet than the other guys' gray boxes. That in turn could, in the hypercompetitive world...
Lately, however, 64-bit consoles like Nintendo and PlayStation have lost a little of their punch. Maybe it's because PC games have improved so fast--along with PCs themselves--while the quality of the consoles has stood still. Or maybe it's the advent of the more powerful 128-bit Sega Dreamcast that my pals and I have been testing...
...powered by tiny circuits etched in silicon by a laser, but a computer based on molecule-sized circuits would be vastly more compact and require much less power -- James Heath, the UCLA professor leading the project, has suggested that a molecular computer with the processing power of 100 conventional PCs would be about the size of a grain of salt...
Accordingly, Dell has withstood a profit squeeze on PCs. Estimates are that last year it posted an operating profit of $268 on each PC it shipped, while Compaq earned only $64 a unit and IBM actually lost $127. Even so, Dell is not relying just on PCs to extend its proud record of being the only company among the FORTUNE 500 that has increased revenues and profits more than 40% in each of the past three years. It is, in fact, somewhat de-emphasizing PCs to put more of a manufacturing and marketing push on such higher-margin products...
...turns out, there's never been a better time to buy a recordable CD-ROM drive. An appliance that until quite recently rarely made it out of the turbo-geek community has suddenly gone mainstream and is now an option--and in some cases, a standard--on desktop PCs. Even IBM has begun shipping them on selected models...