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¶ … Shift From Personal to Personalized Computing

A fundamental shift towards consumerization of technology formerly restricted to the datacenter or desktop has taken place in the last decade, enabled by revolutionary advances led by Apple Computer and several software organizations. At the heart of these advances is a globalized supply chain providing tremendous economies of scale for consumer electronics components, originating with Asian manufacturers such as the Foxconn complex in Shenzen, China, and similar facilities Huawei, and HTC in Taiwan.

These dual phenomena have resulted in a positive demand feedback effect, with the incomes of increasing numbers of consumers in an increasing number of countries worldwide rising to the threshold of being able to afford consumer gadgets, while the price of those same gadgets continues to decrease. The mobile phone manufacturer HTC provides an illustrative example, shipping a full 100% more telephone units in 2011 over the prior year.

NVIDIA Corporation forecasts that the market for smartphones to eventually reach ten times the size of the market for personal computers. Gartner research corroborates such trends with a forecast of over one billion annual smartphone unit sales by 2015, representing a fourfold increase in four years.

Enabling core technologies the ever increasing compute power in ever-smaller units include multi-core processors, moldable polymer battery technology, solid-state flash memory technology, and advances in ultra-high resolution miniaturized liquid crystal-based screen displays including intuitive touch-based screen technology and more intuitive operating system software.

Handheld devices can now embody the core architecture of desktop computers, with equivalent and greater capabilities, and furthermore have introduced the compelling dimensions of personalization capability and popular fashion elegance.

Article summary: "The end of Wintel"

The historic market-dominating alliance of hardware and software giants Intel and Microsoft has begun to fragment and dissolve in recent years. The popular nickname "Wintel" has been applied to represent the union of Microsoft's Windows platform and Intel's central processing units. Both firms remain highly profitable with quarterly net earnings of three to five billion dollars each, and as of mid-2010 more than three-quarters of personal computers in use worldwide still featured the Wintel core standard.

Since neither Microsoft nor Intel has thus far been able to compete with the Apple juggernaut in the smartphone or tablet computer personal device space, each has entered into new cooperative relationships with other vendors in an attempt to become competitive once again. Intel has teamed with Nokia to develop new open-source mobile operating software, while Microsoft has moved closer to the European chip hardware maker ARM to develop its own alternative to Intel and arch-competitor AMD's core processor and chipset hardware.