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That's true, but the author is looking at what's under the hood -- at the moment, ALL of those companies are heavily depending on Microsoft and/or Intel. In most cases, both. Example -- IBM is still one of Intel's biggest server OEM's. And most of IBM's corporate environment runs in Windows. (For that matter, the same could be said for most of the bloated US Federal government.) The author is also ignoring the fact that the Wintel duopoly has been making inroads in corporate markets, as well -- for years now Intel has pretty much owned the low and mid-range server markets, and is making inroads on higher end markets (in fact, the only thing that so far has been able to hurt Itanium meaingfully is... Xeon), and due largely to SQL Server, Microsoft has been making large inroads into those markets also. Apple's growth in the PC market isn't harming Intel one bit -- quite the opposite in fact, because Apple's success is tied to Intel. I don't think Intel's dominance is in any danger. Microsoft's is another story -- Intel will be able to gain a lot of mobile market share, because Intel has the best semiconductor manufacturing in the business. That said, I think that ARM will be a tougher competitor than AMD, because ARM is already much, much bigger, and some the foundries making ARM processors for their partners are larger than Intel, even if they aren't quite as high-tech. The declining margins in processors are probably why Intel's been going after the graphics market, the cluster-on-a-chip market (Larrabee), and doing the whole-system thing for the mobile market, rather than just the Atom chip by itself. |