Will Intel stand by and watch as a new computing wave appears?

The company in question is Intel and Hauser believes it is likely to be left on the sidelines when the next wave of computing arrives. The reason? Hauser says the next wave will be mobile computing and that wave will be dominated by companies who license microprocessors, rather than building and selling them. So what are these waves to which Hauser refers? Essentially, they can be bracketed as mainframes, minis, workstations and pcs. The mainframe world was pretty much owned by IBM, although a number of other companies tried to take some of its business. Minicomputers – mini mainframes to a certain extent – saw the rise of companies such as Digital Equipment (DEC) and Data General. Workstations and pcs arrived almost in parallel, although the pc market took longer to boom. Workstations – essentially desktop minicomputers – were popular with scientific and technical users and saw the rise of companies such as Apollo, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics. Many of these companies developed their own processors. Alongside devices from Sun and Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard developed the PA-RISC architecture before developing the Itanium processor in association with Intel. The pc industry, meanwhile, grew from humble origins. The IBM PC, launched in 1981, had 16k of ram, an Intel 8088 cpu running at 4.77MHz and a floppy drive – but no hard disk. Despite this, it had an eye watering price tag. Mainframes, minis and workstations were essentially designed and built by their supplier – even down to the cpu. The pc industry, however, has evolved around the so called Wintel platform – the Microsoft Windows operating system and Intel's microprocessors. Hauser's point is that, despite their success, none of these groundbreakers dominated the next wave of computing. IBM is now more interested in software than it is in computers, although it still designs and makes processors. DEC, Apollo, Data General, Silicon Graphics and a host of others are no more. One of the criticisms levelled against companies such as DEC was their complacency; they were too slow to recognise the need for change and by the time they did, they had been overtaken. Will Intel – and Microsoft, come to that – stand by and watch as the world move past them when this next wave arrives?