Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | X | XML Journal

The next-generation building blocks: reduce the amount of time and money you spend on applications.

Article Excerpt
Although Intel Corporation was arguably one of the first companies in the industry to build and introduce microprocessors, the company's main business for almost 20 years after its founding was the fabrication of memory integrated circuits, not microprocessors.

The opportunity for the company to exert its most fundamental impact in the industry did not come until the late '80s: building a computer industry based on interchangeable, interoperable hardware components. This process was triggered by the confluence of two factors that turned into serendipitous opportunities in the long term.

The first was that by the mid 80s memory manufacturing became unsustainable as a viable business due to continued price pressure from Japanese manufacturers. This led to a decision to focus on the more complex microprocessor chips.

The second event was unwittingly sparked by IBM: a design team in Boca Raton, Florida, was bringing a personal computer to market. To compress the schedule, the design team decided to make heavy use of outsourced technologies, including operating system software from a then obscure company called Microsoft. The primary driver for this work was time to market. To speed up the design and integration process, IBM had to be fairly open in disclosing the specifications of the various subsystems making up a personal computer. This relative openness provided opportunities for emerging, fast-moving companies to step in and become suppliers, first to IBM, and later within the industry segments that arose.

A necessary condition for interoperability is the existence of standards that describe how the building blocks interact with each other. These standards can be de facto, either because they are adopted by an entity large enough to move the market, like IBM did with the original PC, or by default because there are no competitive alternatives. This happened with the S-100 computer bus, an early industry standard that predates the IBM PC and the Centronics printer interface. Most of the standards work today takes place through formal industry-sponsored consortia. The most prominent...