Now the Federal Trade Commission has filed similar-sounding antitrust charges against Intel. Whether the FTC can prove that Intel's tough tactics crossed the line into outright illegality remains to be seen. What's clear to anyone paying close attention to the technology headlines is that Intel is, at this moment in its history, hardly an unstoppable juggernaut like, well, Microsoft. But the two companies are in substantially different positions in mid-1998. Intel, on the other hand, has been having a rough time of late.
Trouble is, the low end is where the market has headed in the past year.
Meanwhile, last week Intel announced that its next-generation Merced chip, originally slated for 1999 release, won't ship until 2000. But it does remind us that the cyclical microchip business is in constant turmoil, and that Intel's dominance is under constant, real assault. When Intel does put its name on media properties, like its Web site called Mediadome, it's usually to showcase advanced technologies that happen to work a lot better running on high-end Intel processors. And while it's a cinch to peel that Intel sticker off your new computer, it's far from easy to escape Microsoft's Windows start-up screen. By that time, of course, the chip industry will have run another lap or two around the processor-speed racetrack, and the marketplace will probably look very different from where it is today.