Intel and Newsweek have produced a report on the importance of innovation to economic growth.
For the last 100 years the biggest contribution to industrial innovation has been the electronics industry.
For the last 60 years the biggest contributor to innovation in electronics has been microelectronics.
For the last 20 years, the biggest single market for microelectronics, the computer market, has been dominated by Microsoft and Intel.
With Microsoft and Intel taking around 90% of the profits of the computer industry, there has been little opportunity for other companies to make profits in the computer market.
Without profits from the computer market, other chip companies have had slim pickings from which to invest in microelectronics R&D.
And without profits from the computer industry, VCs have felt progressively less inclined to back start-up microelectronics companies which target the computer market.
So innovation stalls.
As innovation always stalls when governments allow over-mighty corporations to dominate markets.
Innovation? Intel should try it sometime. (I assume your article was written with a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek.) Can anyone remember a truly innovative product coming out of Intel?
True innovation in computer development has been suppressed by the utter dominance of Wintel, and the lack of corresponding competition for constructive new developments in computer architectures and supporting software (read O/S). I estimate that this duopoly has set back progress in computerdom by at least ten years.
I couldn't agree more, dbs, that was the point I was trying (obviously rather inadequately) to make. The effect of Moore's Law should have been either to make a PC cost about $50 by now, or make a $1000 PC as powerful as a Cray. Neither happened. Point made - Wintel has stifled innovation which is why their involvement in innovation forums and debates is deeply ironic.
I wouldn't say Intel has given up on innovation. Look at what they did with SSDs, in a market now saturated with viable competitors. Instead of copying existing architectures, they started from scratch and developed an architecture that to this day tops the benchmarks.
However, in the mid- to high-end CPU market, where there are no viable competitors, it appears to me that Intel is doing what's in their best interest (maximizing profits from older technology that is still the best in the market instead of pushing for innovation as hard as they would if they had real competition).
Well, John K, I agree that maximising the return on old technology is what businessmen do, but being able to do this without competitive challenge is a by-product of Intel's quasi-monopoly hold on the PC processor market. All the more reason to break up the quasi-monopoly and get some technological competition back into the x86 market. Also, while deliberately holding back innovation is understandable from a business perspective, it's not exactly consistent with Intel's self-description as the 'leader in silicon innovation'.