Despite the title, we won’t talk about 911 today, though, since plenty of others will. Rather, I thought it would be interesting to see what else we were talking about around that time, and how those stories panned out after five years.
The biggest controversy at that time was about AMD’s Performance Rating. Intel had just pretty much wrecked the MHz comparison with Willamette, and AMD (quite legitimately) implemented a PR measurement to adjust for this, but at the time, people. . . . didn’t . . . believe it, including some main men of some big websites.
Boy, was that making a mountain out of a molehill! How many of you didn’t buy an AMD processor due to PR? 🙂
An even more greatly disliked item at that time was the proposed product activation for Windows XP. Like PR, PA is still around, and has been fortified over the years. Yes, there are still ways around it, but the hassle factor is higher than it was back then.
Rather more importantly in the great scheme of things, HP and Compaq had just decided to merge, and Carly Fiorina was doing corporate porn.
Unlike PR and PA, Carly is not around anymore, well, at least not at HP. We didn’t buy her form-over-substance shtick at the time, and after a while, neither did HP, though not after a tumultuous merger that barely scraped through, and is still considered dubious five years later. HP/Compaq bought back the title of world’s biggest PC maker it had lost to Dell for a while, until Dell grew it back.
I guess the moral of the story is that a lot, maybe even most things that seem to be a big deal at the time really aren’t.
Last but not least, there was this article, which talked about the AMD-Intel rivalry and fanboydom at a time when, as the article put it, “AMD has had a great year, and Intel really hasn’t.”
Some things never change. 🙂
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