Progress has not stopped. In the newer technology industries, whatever is happening today has happened before. It is a world in flux, and that is why stock prices are so volatile. The creation of a new Internet communications structure goes forward at a rapid pace, with scores of companies developing optical components and systems to send information via light waves, or photons, rather than electrons, which are slower. Wireless is emerging as a solution.
Products are already on the market.
The deck gets reshuffled in every downturn. Intel is doing just such preparation. But computing is shifting to mobile phones, hand-held computers and Internet communications. Its investments and efforts to change stem from having been there before. Intel saw U.S. firms cut back on investment in the downturn of the 1970s and lose the market for memory chips to Japanese competitors.