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The article examines the gap between what consumers want and what vendors would like to sell them. Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who works for Intel, the world's biggest semiconductor-maker, has been travelling around Asia for three years to observe how Asians use, or choose not to use, technology. She was especially struck by the differences in how westerners and Asians view their homes. Americans tended to say things like "my home is my castle" and furnish it as a self-contained playground, says Ms Bell. Asians were more likely to tell her that "my home is a place of harmony", "grace", "simplicity" or "humility". These Asians recoiled from gadgets that made noises or looked showy or intrusive. Even within western cultures, Ms Bell, who is Australian, has found startling differences in the way people view technology. "For Americans, adopting technology is an expression of American-ness, part of the story of modernity and progress," says Ms Bell. For many other people, it may be just a hassle, or downright pretentious. And even Americans, perhaps more prone than others to workaholism, can get frustrated by technology. Contrast these insights with the technological visions that the industry is currently peddling. The best place to see them is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held every January in Las Vegas. A small portion of these wares eventually do end up being used by ordinary humans.

America's technology industry is becoming more and more intertwined with government. It has realised that the machinery of government in Washington can greatly influence its growth and profitability, and is becoming increasingly involved in lobbying. Conversely, the American government has become keenly aware of IT's crucial importance for the nation's well-being, heightened by the emphasis on homeland security. This should not come as a surprise, argues Debora Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School. "When technologies first emerge, there is a rush away from government and a surge of individualism. Over time, however, the rebels tend to return to the state." The reason public rules usually find their way into a technology, Spar argues, is because government can protect property rights and restore order. But it also happens when a technology becomes widely used. The chipmaker never had any ideological qualms about co-operating with government. In that sense, it has always been a mature company. Intel benefited from government money in the 1980s when it came under competitive pressure from Japanese manufacturers. Other Silicon Valley firms, too, owe much to the state. Oracle, for instance, grew out of a consulting job for the CIA, and the taxpayer stumps up for over a fifth of its orders. The Valley as a whole, however, did not develop a political conscience until 1996, when it successfully campaigned against a California ballot initiative that would have made shareholder lawsuits much easier. This alerted the region's leaders to the need to get more involved to defend their interests, leading to the creation of such groups as TechNet, a lobbying and fund-raising organisation. This environment also provided fertile ground for having a go at Microsoft. The antitrust case against the company might never have been brought without its competitors stirring up the trustbusters.

Presents information related to a smouldering dispute in the computer industry. Details of the clash over Intel Corp's increasing encroachment into the PC maker's market; Explains that Compaq was one of the few big PC makers that were still profitable, and the only one making money in the booming; Reveals that to stay ahead of its competition, Intel reckons it must release a new microprocessor generation.

The article focuses on the U.S. computer industry companies Dell and Hewlett-Packard. The companies' efforts to adjust to the declining use of microcomputers by businesses and consumers due to the introduction of technological innovations such as tablet computers and cloud computing are discussed. The idea of "verticalization" within high technology industries, where companies produce and market hardware, computer operating systems and computer software rather than specialize, is considered.

The article focuses on PlayBook, a tablet computer produced by the high technology industry firm Research in Motion to be introduced in 2011. The product is cited as an example of competition within the computer industry in the market for tablet computers now dominated by the iPad computer from Apple Inc. Features of the PlayBook designed to appeal to business customers are discussed.

The article focuses on retired computer industry executive Andrew Grove, former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Intel. Grove's decision in 1991 to market his company's microprocessor integrated circuits directly to consumers is discussed. Grove discusses his belief that medical care and the pharmaceutical industry should copy some of the management techniques used by the computer industry.

This article reports on the business problems experienced by Dell Computer Corporation. The largest computer maker in the world, Dell suffered declines in its stock prices, lost market share and had its growth rate fall in 2005-06. Low computer prices, the resurgence of rival computer makers and changes in the computer market played a part in the decline of the company.

The article discusses whether Microsoft is finally about to face real competition in desktop-computer software. For years, many in the computer business have hoped that Linux, a freely available computer operating system, would become a viable alternative to Microsoft's Windows, the near universal standard for the world's personal computers. Within the past month, some of the world's most powerful technology firms have pledged considerable support for Linux on the desktop, including Dell and Sun Microsystems. By the end of the decade, Linux's share could grow, reckons Al Gillen, an analyst at technology consultancy IDC, displacing Macs as the main alternative. That would still fall far short of Linux's growing popularity in the market for powerful server computers. Linux aficionados, however, say its chances on the desktop should be better. However, despite improvements Linux faces obstacles. Some of Linux's main backers have relatively modest ambitions for the operating system. Linux's main appeal is likely to be to companies rather than home users. But the future is uncertain, and Linux still might yet represent another kind of threat to Microsoft.

The article discusses why the use of anthropologists in technology firms, once a novelty, has now become commonplace. Corporate anthropology is now mainstream, particularly among technology firms. The use of anthropological techniques in industry goes back to the 1920s, when a group of researchers, including Lloyd Warner of Harvard University, conducted pioneering experiments at a factory in Cicero, Illinois, examining the impact of pay, working conditions and other incentives on productivity. Now the computer industry needs the advice of anthropologists more than ever before, argues Marietta Baba, a social scientist at Michigan State University. Competition and increasingly saturated markets now mean that computer makers, like makers of other mass-produced consumer goods, need to understand their customers and design products for specific markets. All of this means business anthropologists are no longer detached observers, but are getting involved in shaping corporate strategy.

This article reports on developments in the battle between computer chip makers Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices. The computer industry loves a good bunfight, so everyone is enjoying the current battle between Intel, the world's largest chip-maker, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), its smaller rival. Intel is currently on the defensive. This week Hewlett-Packard (HP), a computer maker and a close ally of Intel, said it would use AMD's Opteron processor chip in a new line of powerful server computers. The news came just days after Intel grudgingly unveiled a new version of its Xeon chip, which mimics features of the Opteron. AMD, it seems, has Intel on the run. At issue is the best way to move the industry from 32-bit to 64-bit chips. Except at the very high end and in some specialist niches, almost all computers are currently powered by 32-bit chips. With Opteron, AMD's approach was to take an Intel-compatible 32-bit chip, and add special 64-bit extensions to it. Intel's approach, in contrast, was to start with a clean sheet and design an entirely new 64-bit chip, called Itanium.

If history is any guide, the IT industry's future will be about services and customer power. As a technological revolution matures, its centre of gravity tends to shift from products to services. In railways, for instance, equipment makers and train operators struggled, but lots of money was made by firms that used the railway infrastructure to offer new kinds of services, explains Brad DeLong at the University of California at Berkeley. In the same way, after the radio bubble, it was not the makers of the hardware that benefited most from the new medium, but broadcasters such as CBS. A similar shift is bound to take place in the IT industry, predicts Geoffrey Moore of the Chasm Group. He says the sector's traditional business models are past their prime. Software firms, for instance, have made much of their money from shrink-wrapped products and platforms such as operating systems and databases. Increasingly, selling services of all kinds would be a better business to be in. But it is not just IT firms that are becoming service providers, writes David Moschella in his book, "Customer-Driven IT." Being on top of the value chain, argues Moschella, customers will increasingly be the industry's driving force. He urges them to band together and jointly develop new applications, platforms and standards in the same way that the financial industry has created credit cards and networks of ATMs. All of this suggests that IT customers will capture more of the sector's rent. But even if things play out differently, the balance of power is likely to shift away from vendors and in favour of buyers. Having learnt the painful lessons of over-investment during the boom, they will no longer allow themselves to be locked into proprietary technology.

If Google were to close down its popular web-search service tomorrow, it would be much missed. Yet many IT firms would not be too unhappy if Google were to disappear. They certainly dislike the company's message to the world: you do not need the latest and greatest in technology to offer outstanding services. In the words of Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame, now chief executive of Opsware, a software start-up: "Except applications and services, everything and anything in computing will soon become a commodity." Exactly what is meant by "commoditisation", though, depends on whom you talk to. It is most commonly applied to the PC industry. Although desktops and laptops are not a truly interchangeable commodity such as crude oil, the logo on a machine has not really mattered for years. As the term implies, "commoditisation" is not a state, but a dynamic. As the technology becomes more widespread, better understood and standardised, its value falls. Eventually it joins the sector's "sediment", the realm of bottom feeders with hyper-efficient metabolisms that compete mainly on cost. The IT industry also differs from other technology sectors in that its wares become less valuable as they get better, and go from "undershoot" to "overshoot," to use the terms coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. But although expensive Unix systems, the strength of Sun Microsystems, are--and will probably remain for some time--a must for "mission-critical" applications, servers are quickly commoditising. Google goes even further. A visit to one of the company's data centres in Silicon Valley is a trip back to the future. In the same way that members of the Valley's legendary Homebrew Computer Club put together the first PCs using off-the-shelf parts in the early 1970s, Google has built a huge computer system out of electronic commodity parts.

In information technology, youth seems to spring eternal. But think again: the real star of the high-tech industry is in fact a grey-haired septuagenarian. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, came up with probably the most famous prediction in IT: that the number of transistors which could be put on a single computer chip would double every 18 months. (What Moore actually predicted was that the figure would double every year, later correcting his forecast to every two years, the average of which has come to be stated as his" law".) This forecast, which implies a similar increase in processing power and reduction in price, has proved broadly accurate. Yet this pace of development is not dictated by any law of physics. Instead, it has turned out to be the industry's natural rhythm, and has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Even more importantly, Moore's law provided the IT industry with a solid foundation for its optimism. In high-tech, the mantra goes, everything grows exponentially. This sort of thinking reached its peak during the internet boom of the late 1990s. Ubiquitous cyber-gurus, framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital land in which growth would be limitless, commerce frictionless and democracy direct. In 2003, everybody is older and wiser. Given the recession in IT, the idea of a parallel digital universe where the laws of economic gravity do not apply has been quietly abandoned. What has yet to sink in is that the downturn is something more than the bottom of another cycle in the technology industry. Rather, the sector is going through deep structural changes which suggest that it is growing up or even, horrors, maturing.

Presents information on the merger of computer companies Compaq Corp. and Digital Equipment Corp., and the repercussions in the aftermath of this merge. Effect of this merge on Compaq; Reason for the decrease in the popularity of personal computer; Cause for which Digital rejected the offer of Compaq.

Examines the infrastructure and social conditions of the region known as Silicon Valley, California. Information on the region's high concentration of companies in the high technology and computer industries; Threats to the economic stability of Silicon Valley; Things to admire about Silicon Valley.

Focuses on network computers. Comparison of the price for network computer with the price for personal computer (PC); Benefits from switching from a PC to a network computer; Low lifetime cost of the network computers in comparison to the lifetime cost of PCs; Need for companies to update its existing PCs rather than switch to network computers.

Reports that computer chip makers are catching up with Intel Corp., the semi-conductor giant from Santa Clara in California. Information on how Intel has dominated the computer hardware market for a decade; Announcement of a California-based chip maker regarding designing of a processor that is compatible with Intel's Pentium chip; Analysis of financial status and revenue spending by Intel.

Presents information on Digital Equipment Corp. Details of the sale of some of Digital's less-profitable and peripheral businesses; Reference to the disappointing sales of Alpha, Digital's superfast microprocessor; Advice on how Digital should handle its daunting problems; Opinion that the Digital brand suffers from poor market awareness and uncompetitive pricing.

This article focuses on various trends in the computer industry. Computers gobble up data. New functions, memory-hungry control systems and the vast streams of bits and bytes are needed to deal with the sound and vision of the brave new multimedia universe. So the smartest software engineers are nowadays looking for ways to shrink the data computers consume, without reducing their nutritional value. One way to cram more data into less disk-space or optical fibre is to avoid repetition. Users of personal computers can double their effective disk space with products such as Stacker, SuperStor and DoubleSpace whose names reflect the basic philosophy by eliminating irrelevant letters and redundant spaces between words. Dealing with text, though, is fairly simple compared with compressing music and videos.

The article looks at the leadership problems at U.S. computer company Hewlett-Packard (HP), with a focus on their 2011 appointment of chief executive officer (CEO) Meg Whitman, an outsider. The author notes the six CEOs HP has lost since 1999, and relates the company's past success to promoting leaders from within. He describes HP as searching unsuccessfully for a so-called corporate savior from outside, which more corporations, especially technology firms, have been doing since the 1970s.

The article examines the high technology companies Sun Microsystems and Motorola. Both firms reported significant business losses and sales declines for the third quarter of 2008. Besides the effect of the global recession, each company has concentrated on making hardware, rather than the computer software and services which have become the main area of growth in high technology industries.

The article discusses the recent trend of the computer industry celebrating the anniversaries of various product innovations. The five-year-anniversary of the iPod was celebrated in the autumn of 2006, by newspapers from around the world giving tributes to the music player. At the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, a symposium was held to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Intel's 4004 microprocessor.

The article looks at problems facing high technology industries. Novell's two top executives departed following a string of poor results. Silicon Graphics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. 3Com replaced its boss following lacklustre performance. Borland shed one-fifth of its workforce and is preparing to sell the best-known part of its business. Companies that start off with a successful product often fail to stay the course, explains Jim Collins, the author of "Built to Last".

This article discusses Microsoft Corp. chief executive officer Bill Gates and the speech he delivered at Comdex, an annual computer-industry trade show. Much has changed since Bill Gates made his first keynote speech at Comdex in 1983. Back then his firm was touting a now-forgotten spreadsheet called Multiplan and had just announced plans for a new program called Windows. Windows, just a prototype in 1983, is now the dominant personal-computer (PC) operating system, having seen off a host of rivals. Microsoft has become the world's largest software firm, and Mr. Gates the world's richest man. The shift in the technology industry's centre of gravity is away from PCs towards sexier consumer-electronics devices such as mobile phones, games consoles, digital-video recorders and flat-panel TVs. Microsoft faces the same challenge: its dominance in PC operating systems and office productivity software leaves little scope for growth, forcing it to look to new consumer markets. Microsoft has far less clout in the world of consumer electronics. Its smartphone software has been slow to gain adoption, its Xbox game console lags far behind the Sony's PlayStation 2 and its software for TV set-top boxes failed to gain much traction.

Offers observations on the benefits of consumers becoming less fixated on raw technology, such as microchips, and more interested in reliability and user-friendliness in computer systems. When Gordon Moore, the 74-year-old co-founder of Intel, a microchip-maker, gave a speech at a conference in San Francisco, California there were standing ovations and fans asking for autographs. For, in the early days of computing, Moore spotted a principle: the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double roughly every 18 months. Moore's law is not a law in the physical sense, but it has proved broadly accurate: between 1971 and 2001, transistor density has doubled every 1.96 years. However, as Moore himself observes, "no exponential is forever." Moore's law may be good for at least another decade, but eventually chips will get faster more slowly. More often than not, computer systems are still unreliable, insecure and hard to integrate. Instead of stuffing more technology down its customers' throats, the information technology industry must help them to use its wares to become more productive. Unless the industry focuses less on Moore's law and more on Google's law, it will become a commodity business.

Presents information on the regions that are similar to Silicon Valley, California, in their economy's focus on high technology and the computer industry. Information on Great Britain as a principal candidate of Western Europe for the status of the valley; Prospects of the high technology industries in India; Details of California's other migrant-driven economic clusters.

Focuses on the market trends in the personal computer (PC) industry in the U.S. Rise in the share price and profits of Dell Computer Corp. by 250% and 60% respectively; Adoption of direct sale strategy by Dell for selling its computers; Use of direct sales strategy by Dell to gauge trends in demand in the computer industry; Impact of the fall in the price of memory chips, which make up about 20% of the cost of a PC, on the sale of Dell's PC; Focus set on consumers by Gateway 2000 Inc., Dell's biggest competitor.

The article presents the introduction of flat-screen TV to the market by Japanese electronic companies. Despite the expected low rate for its initial sales, Japanese firms will release their products because of low competition, high potential of attracting consumers and its role in converging TV and personal computers. The Japanese electronic industry views flat-screen TV as a promising business along with desktop computers.

The article offers information on computer company Oracle, which is considered the top manufacturer of corporate computing technologies. It was founded by Larry Ellison, who built the idea for the company on the concept of relational databases which had not been used by International Business Machines (IBM). Along with partner Bob Miner, Ellison wrote a relational database program in the 1970s that proved to be far faster than had been thought possible. Oracle was able to capture 30% of the database market, including IBM computer users, by the time that IBM caught up with the technology.

Discusses why the abundance of computer technologies and standards is a sign of health, not illness in the computer industry. Why standards battles are a healthy industry's by-product; Development of powerful new technologies; Why standards matter; Open systems; Details.