This article says the Grinch is going to steal Christmas. It says that flat-out for Europe, and they’ve revised worldwide PC figures to show that they will essentially flat-line in 2002.
Who’s the Grinch? According to IDC, “home users . . . happy with what they’ve got. We are waiting for our next killer application. Market saturation is also to blame.”
The Next Killer App
I’ll tell you what the next killer app is, the only thing we’re going to see in the very near future that the average Joe actually is likely to want and where a lot of CPU power can at least arguably make a difference even Joe can see.
DVD recording (authoring, ripping, etc., etc. . . . ).
What else is there that the average person might really want?
We talked about this a couple months ago, and it is starting to show up in the sales figures.
Think not? Look here. Look at item 3; it’s a Sony DVD recorder that can record in a number of DVD formats.
Look at Multiwave’s Top Ten. Number nine is a Toshiba DVD recorder.
Newegg’s Top Ten doesn’t have a DVD recorder, its top seller are the disks.
Something is going on out there.
Imagine being a Hollywood honcho hearing this.
Can’t be all too comforting for an Intel exec, either. (I suspect AMD execs don’t have the luxury of thinking about anything outside the company at the moment). On the one hand, they’re telling content providers they’re for protection. On the other hand, they know full well that those doing the opposite is selling a lot of CPUs for them.
This is just the dawn. The Day of the DVD Recorder will be next year, which will only intensify the legal and political wars as content providers try to stop this bandwagon before it really gets rolling.
P.S. Some may say that it’s really encoding DVDs into a format like DiVX that really chews up the CPU cycles, and you’re right, but when you’re a marketeer grasping for straws, that’s just a minor detail. 🙂
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