Short Circuit: Intel Loses Ground in Mobile Battle: Surely the Glasses are Half the 3D Fun? Electronics News

IBM, the U.S.-based technology and services giant, recently celebrated its 100^th birthday. But the company was lucky to make it after a ‘near death’ experience in 1993 following the highest loss (US$5 billion) in U.S. corporate history at that time.IBM had failed to take competitors seriously and found its dominant market position in PCs irretrievably eroded as more nimble companies ‘cloned’ IBM’s products and undercut its prices.IBM was saved by then CEO Lou Gerstner’s realisation that it couldn’t compete in hardware and should therefore refocus on services and software. For the first quarter of 2011, IBM generated revenues of US$24.6 billion ($22.7 billion) and a pre-tax profit of US$4 billion ($3.8 billion).This got the Saint thinking about how many of today’s tech giants would still be around in the late 21^st Century. Apple, for example, was founded in 1976, so despite its apparently unassailable position, it has another 65 years to go to match ‘Big Blue’. And the Cupertino-based firm has already had one near death experience in the late 90s before Steve Jobs returned to resurrect the company he founded. Microsoft is a mere stripling too, having been founded just 361 days before Apple.Intel (founded in 1968, 2010 revenue US$43.6 billion ($40.3 billion), net income US$11.5 billion ($10.6 billion)) is another apparently invincible giant of the technology sector. The company is the World’s top chipmaker with around an 83 percent market share in the microprocessor sector. Surely its longevity is assured?Not necessarily. A report in Electronics News this week notes that the company is experiencing a slow down in growth for its chips used in PCs.Intel is troubled by the gradual move away from desktop PCs and laptops to portable devices such as tablet computers and smartphones. These devices can now do almost everything a PC can do, with the added bonus that they can be carried around in a pocket.The problem for Intel is that many of these products don’t use the company’s chips. For example, the iPhone - unlike Apple’s desktop and laptop computers that do have “Intel Inside” - uses Apple’s own A4 processor. This chip is based on British-based ARM’s licensed technology, the technology that is becoming increasingly popular in the processor market for mobile devices. This is because ARM chips are reduced instruction set computing (RISC) devices that don’t need to run as fast as Intel x86 chips to do the same amount of work, and hence require less power. And low power is critical for battery-powered products.Intel dabbled with ARM-based processors, but got out of the business in 2006, selling its XScale technology to Marvell in 2006. Now the company offers its Atom range for mobile computing applications, but the chip is struggling for sales.To predict Intel’s immediate demise would be foolish. The company is powerful and innovative and, despite the hype, the PC market is still over ten times larger than that for tablet computers (and unlikely to collapse any time soon). Despite slower sales, over 80 million PCs sold in the first quarter of 2011, compared with 7.2 million tablets.But will the company be around in 57 years time? The Saint would wager Intel would be just a footnote in history by then, along with Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Facebook. (Sadly, your correspondent won’t be around then to see if his rash projection pans out.)He will stick his neck out further and predict that some of today’s big names will celebrate their first century though, backing Apple and Amazon to make it through to the 2070s and 2090s respectively. Both companies’ business models revolve around services and content rather than product lines (Apple’s product are just part of its business, and are primarily designed to make it easy to access content from its iTunes and App Stores) which make them more likely to last in the fast moving tech sector.       

Surely the Glasses Are Half the 3D Fun?

Much of today’s technology has its roots further back in history that most would think. While this week’s news featured the latest incarnation of 3D courtesy of Hitachi Display’s lenticular-lensed display for mobile devices, a particularly popular online encyclopaedia notes that the public first stumped up for the 3D experience as far back as 1922.The heyday of 3D cinema was the 50s when North American audiences were treated to classics such as “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “It came from Outer Space” (“Fantastic sights leap at you!”, notes the latter’s promotional poster). Audiences wore glasses with polarised lenses such that each eye received the same image but from a slightly different perspective. Apparently, the plot was secondary to the effects in these cinema epics.After a resurgence in the late 80s, 3D became big again at the beginning of this century and has latterly migrated to the home courtesy of several consumer electronics companies offering 3D TV.The common thread that has linked 3D since its inception is the glasses. The Saint is guessing that manufacturers make these particularly unflattering to remove any temptation for patrons to steal them at the end of the movie. The result – in your correspondent’s opinion – is highly comical. The Saint has spent many an hour in his local multiplex giggling at his fellow audience members rather than what’s on the screen (particularly if it’s Hollywood’s latest attempt at humour).So he’s hoping that efforts to make the novelty spectacles unnecessary for 3D portable device displays will come to naught. The thought of early adopters of 3D portables wandering the streets wearing ‘unconventional’ heavy-rimmed dark glasses – and bumping into sundry street furniture - is just too appealing.
Short Circuit: Intel Loses Ground in Mobile Battle: Surely the Glasses are Half the 3D Fun? Electronics News