Raiden's Realm: The Bane of Forced Obsolescence

The Bane of Forced Obsolescence (Page 3 of 3)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Feb 19, 2007 at 02:44pm
Section: Editorials
Printer Friendly Version
Legacy URL

But there is still a way for companies to succeed while providing what customers really want. Here’s four things I’d like to see appear in the near future that will both give customers what they want and the sales companies want.

Hardware Companies:

A low power war. AKA, a war where the winner is whoever can make hardware that requires the absolute least amount of power. I’d like to see video cards that draw 25w. CPU’s that draw less than 30w. Printers that draw less than 1w. Etc, etc. The catch is, they can’t sacrifice any current performance while gaining that extremely low power requirement.
A size war. AKA, a war where the winner is whoever can pack the most horsepower into the smallest footprint possible. For example, put the power of an x1900 graphics card into the footprint of a low profile ATI9800.
A cooling war. AKA, a war where the winner is whoever can create the coolest running chip, card or device while not sacrificing any current performance.

Software Companies:

An anti-bloat war. AKA, a war where the winner is any software company that can create high performance, state of the art software with quality features, and maintain the lowest memory and hard drive footprint possible. An example of this would be in games. Being able to shrink down games that are 4.7 megs in size to just under 300 megs without sacrificing any quality or gameplay. And don’t say that’s impossible, because it’s been done already.

Now being that these wars are about conservation rather than performance, hardware companies don’t need to worry about increasing their performance during this time. Now as for the software companies, performance is everything during this time. They need to do everything they can to make their applications run as absolutely fast and stable as possible. The rest can just concentrate on the requirements I stated for each war I listed above. Then from there on out they should continue to try and adhere to these standards and maintain these wars whenever the next big mhz or framerate wars come around. But at this point, I think that those two wars should be put on the shelves again until at least 2012. That will probably draw a lot of boos and hisses from the ultimate performance groups, but so what? Money is where the majority is, and right now that money comes not from the ultimate performance groups, but from the average users. So, if you’re a software or hardware company, who do you want to cater to? The 7% who make up a fringe group, or the 93% who are the mainstream users. If you said the first one, you just failed business 101. I understand it’s fringe groups that drive the market for new products, but isn’t it time for the market to stop, step back, regroup and start focusing on the group that ultimately pays the bills? I am hoping they will.

Previous Page
||

Next Page

Discuss this! ( comments )

Jump To:

Raiden's Realm Social Bookmarking
If you have any problems with any of these links, please let us know. Thanks.

Average vistor rating: 4.6 out of 5 (5 total votes)