Amidst Boom, Warning Signs On The Horizon
from the hold-on-tight dept
Despite some recent stock market hiccups, the economy seems to be breezing along with many tech companies leading the charge. In addition to a booming startup scene and receptive market for IPOs, old IT stalwarts like Cisco and IBM appear to be quite strong. Of course, these things go in cycles, and it's only a matter of when, not if, the next slowdown will occur. Today, chip maker AMD warned of horrible results for the second straight quarter, prompting analysts to warn about a broader slowdown across all areas of consumer electronics, including mobile handsets. Already, the PC market has grown resigned to the fact that the release of Vista will do little to stem the sluggishness of that market. It's not just hardware either. Those covering corporate IT spending are also sensing increased fear and seeing evidence of a coming recession. The flip side to all of this is that we're clearly in a period that's seeing some major technology disruption, so we'd expect to see some pain in traditional markets. Factors that may be hurting the bottom lines of traditional vendors, like plummeting hardware prices and open source software, are boons to savvy companies and consumers. Furthermore, no matter what the overall economy is doing, companies that continue to innovate will be rewarded.
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Federal Reserve will soon raise
All will be affected but not at the same time and not by the same degree.
I fear that technology will be hit harder than the norm.
Of course, now is the time to buy the Groceries, Utilities, Kleenex and Toilet Paper. No matter how bad it gets, you still need to eat, stay warm and go to the bathroom.
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Higher Rates?
Hmmmm?
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What disruptive technologies?
Ok, I'll bite... what technology disruption do you see?
Clarification Wikipedia: Disruptive Technology
The reason I ask, is because most of the currently active technology disruptions are those that work perfectly well over what you already have. If they dont require "more cpu power" or other such nonsense, then it wont be driving a desktop refresh.
What I see as being the dominant disrutpive technology at the moment is heavy slow thick client applications being simplified and turned into lite fast thin client applications that can be accessed from anywhere. Which not only breathes new life into older machines, but also means that you need fewer machines over all.
As technology gets improved, it need not be purchased as often. The consumer wins, the industry loses/stabilizes.
Vista is a prime example of this trend. It requires a WHOLE lot more to deliver tiny marginal improvements in the user experience and everyone merely yawned, as that is not what they are looking for.
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Re: What disruptive technologies?
Yes, I agree the traditional markets should be showing some pain right now. And my whole rant was irrelevant to the topic at hand. My bad.
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AMD
Rather than being a boon to hardware sales, Windows Vista may actually be a burden. You need a lot more power to run it (forget anything under 2 gigs of ram). When I bought a new (Acer) machine a few days ago it took about three hours from the time I plugged it in until it was ready to go - what a pain. There is a learning hurdle in switching to the new operating system. The result is that at my office we would have been willing to upgrade from one machine running xp to another for modest performance improvements because there was virtually no cost to the switch. Now with Vista there is a bigger cost to the switch and we need a bigger performance boost to justify the transition expense.
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