The doom merchants write that these changes herald a new change in the PC business towards low cost models with little room for an upgrade industry. The history of our industry shows that there is a finite level of integration that can occur. Past a certain point and someone somewhere will make one of the functions of your integration redundant, leaving the whole tarnished. My view is that cheap processors and cheap PCs are wonderful. They open up the PC to a whole new section of the population.
Experience shows that once a person gets used to a PC two things happen.
They use it more and they want it do what everyone else s PC does, whether that means running the same application, screensaver, game or whatever. This usually leads to upgrades. The boss of PC World knows this he said something similar only recently. We should all be delighted that AMD, IBM and Cyrix are doing so well. Assuming, that is, that all those lovely sales are not taking too much market share from Intel and that they ARE actually helping to grow the market.