Sramana Mitra’s Forbes.com column this week, “The Coming Convergence”, talks about the Apple acquisition of P A Semi, that I blogged about in my previous post.
Her key points are that:
- vertical integration may be coming back to the computer industry (which was how it was originally, e.g. companies like IBM made everything, including their own hardware, operating systems, middleware and application software in the early days of computers).
- that Apple will be increasing its options by this move, since it can use either the chips from P A Semi or from other semiconductor vendors, depending on whichever is better overall.
Thought-provoking article … interesting to see what happens down the line in a few years and how it may affect different categories of users, if the convergence does happen.
A side effect she mentions is that the WinTel combine may lose share (if such convergence happens a lot).
- Vasudev Ram
