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  • The Future of PC and Mobile Processors PC Magazine logo

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    One of the primary things about being an effective technology industry analysis firm is that we have to clearly communicate our perspectives about the technology industry as a whole to our clients. This requires more than just the regurgitation of information as we gather it in the field. It requires explaining more fundamental elements of what is happening and why. It is because of this that we seem to get one question common to many of the companies that we speak with and provide services to. That question is: "Why is Apple doing so well and what can we do to compete?"


    Particularly of interest to many is why Apple appears to be recession-proof while many others in the hardware business had a rough 18 months or so. There are more reasons then I have time to go into in this article as to why Apple appears to be unstoppable, so I will highlight just a few. I am a big picture strategic thinker by nature and I love thinking about and strategizing around competitive advantage and differentiation. That is why I love analyzing Apple, because they play the strategic game extremely well, particularly when it comes to developing strategies to defend their competitive advantage. There are three key areas that stick out to me as particularly defensible for Apple. 

The Coming Technology Explosion - Part 1

Written by Ben Bajarin Thursday, 06 August 2009 18:46 Last Updated on Friday, 07 August 2009 06:24

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In 2001, my company, Creative Strategies, helped National Semiconductor host a customer conference to communicate National’s strategy and vision.  We do something similar for Phoenix Technologies every year. National, at the time, wanted to show how their products and solutions fit with the innovation happening in the industry. Even though much of their innovative silicon was sold off and never used, I took something important away from that conference.  

In his kickoff speech, CEO Brian Halla made an interesting point about the technology startup bubble, which had burst and was in the process of disintegrating.  He referenced a historical fact that every major industry in the 1900’s went through a similar pattern of growth and decline.  He spoke about how the railroad industry had fueled an increase then diminished. Then the same happened with the auto industry and so on. His point was that the burst of that industry’s bubble was always subsequently followed by a bell curve of growth that greatly surpassed the initial bubble. He reasoned that this secondary large industry growth was caused by the crash of the first bubble. He explained that after the first bubble burst, the cost of components became so cheap that entrepreneurs were able to start experimenting and creating all kinds of innovative products. In essence there was a "glut" of components which manufacturers had geared up to meet demand when all of a sudden demand dropped off the table.  In his railroad example, the initial decline of the railroad industry made it possible to finally perfect and utilize the frozen railroad car which eventually led to the “meat packing” industry.  

The point in his keynote speech was that the startup bubble bursting had the potential to lead to similar innovation where silicon and other important components for infrastructure would become cheap enough so entrepreneurs would experiment and innovate inevitably leading to new markets and technologies.  Although we have yet to see the kind of innovation of which he was speaking, I still believe he is correct.  

As we survey the current technology landscape and gain insight to a lot of the innovation taking place, we are slowly beginning to see a world where it is feasible to easily pack a lot of processing power into more and more devices affordably.  Also important is that it is becoming possible to do so without sacrificing battery life, thus bringing true computing to more and more devices.   This opens up all kinds of new doors for hardware, the web, social interaction, visual entertainment experiences and more.  Other important component costs like displays, memory, controllers and more are also seeing steep declines in price.

This is why we believe we are on the cusp of a technology explosion that will be driven by a whole new generation of “computing class” silicon powering more and more of our every day electronics. 

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