The Computer Industry Is In a Tailspin -- and It's Your Fault 

By Kathleen Maher, Editor, Jon Peddie Associates

 August 27, 2001

Hey, the computer industry has a question to ask you: How come you stopped buying stuff? World markets are catching this flu and when one sector starts to look a little healthier, why then another sector takes a huge dive and takes everything with it. And it's your fault.

Let's start with computers. Okay, so why didn't you buy a computer on schedule? Please don't tell us that it's because you have all the power you need. You've never shown that much intelligence before. No, for just about two decades now you've dutifully lined up to buy the next PC with the next operating system whether you needed to or not. Now, Intel has this swell 2 Ghz chip just waiting in the wings, they're planning to give the thing away, and we're all just a little bit worried about what you are going to do.

Are you waiting for the operating system? Fine. XP is on the way and those little whispers about delays and lawsuits, etc., shouldn't worry anyone. As soon as you make it clear you'll start buying stuff again, why we figure the road will be greased for XP.

And hey, there's lots of other stuff to buy as well. But suddenly you've stopped buying all kinds of things including DVD players, and PDAs, and cars. We're scared to death you're going to stop buying houses and then where are we, all the suckers who paid way too much for our houses, going to be?

Ah, but as we never tire of saying in these pages, luckily there are crazy optimists who are still building things for you to buy.

As we were writing last week, the elves at Intel (we imagine they're mighty big elves) are busy sawing away at prices and readying announcements and pronouncements for IDF, the company's bi-annual info fest and pep rally. At the heart of the festivities is the new 2 GHz Pentium 4s, and also we expect Intel to talk a lot about their products like XScale that will take Intel into new, hopefully growing markets. We see that Epson, a company that's been building graphics controllers for PDAs, has come up with the S1D3708, a new controller for LCDs in cell phones. These chips are destined for the new i-Mode phones being sold in Japan. Now there's something you can buy, eventually—cell phones. Put that on the list; you'll be helping everyone out.

DVD of all description is still making the news, and we're pretty interested to see what Cirrus is going to make of their play in the biz. In addition to buying StreamMachine, a company with a DVD encoder, and ShareWave for wireless networking, Cirrus has also bought LuxSonor, a company that's just announced a DVD decoder. Put it all together and what do you get? Well, it doesn't take a genius to see some darned interesting home networking products going into the oven. Given the current climate, Cirrus has some time to let it all cook, too.

So, c'mon, do your part. This fall buy yourself a nice new computer that plays music, edits video, burns CDs, burns DVDs, sends pictures to mom and gets HDTV. While you're at it buy a new MP3 player, a PDA and a digital camera.

This editorial originally appeared on the JPA website. It is reprinted here with permission.

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