Links of the day

Concerns With Investing In Intel...the key point is the statement:

"PCs, the bread and butter of Intel, have become increasingly commoditized, especially the desktop version. New buyers of PCs would only likely come from the emerging economies, and those would be sub-$400 PCs, not the usual $1000+ PCs that we were used to back in the early 2000s. Performance improvements on the desktop would only affect niche segments such as gaming positively. This would lead to erosion of gross margins in the long run as lesser number of high margin PCs would get sold with time."

I agree with this analysis 100%; one further possible negative for Intel is the move to server virtualization. As enterprises can cost-justify purchasing high end mainframes or servers and run a large number of virtual servers on those large machines; the demand for commodity x86 boxes should shrink.


Population Reference Bureau...their 2006 World Population Data Sheet is a very handy summary of a wealth of demographic data for every country in the world...highly recommended!