Industry Development Late 1990s:  Dotcom mania: small real effect on PC industry Mostly networking equipment manufacturers (Cisco, Nortel)  Y2k: inc
{"Image DocumentName": "Industry Development Late 1990s: 2000 to present:", "Image ImageDescription": "Dotcom mania: small real effect on PC industry. Mostly networking equipment manufacturers (Cisco, Nortel) Y2k: increased PC spending due to compatibility fears to present: Steady decline in PC prices. Component life cycle critical. Decline in PC prices mainly due to decline in component prices. PC industry homogeneous from day one. The dotcom mania had no real effect on the PC industry, as most of the associated spending was in telecommunications infrastructure upgrades. Networking equipment companies like Cisco and Nortel benefited the most from the dotcom boom. On another note, the Y2k crisis led to increased spending on new software and hardware due to the fear of Y2k issues. From 2000 onwards, the market has increasingly become mature. Even IBM could no longer maintain its margins despite its extremely strong brand reputation. There has been a rise in branding and product differentiation efforts. An interesting note is that the PC maker industry has essentially been a mature market from day one, with a highly homogeneous product, simply by design. PCs perform the same functions and is assembled from off the shelf, third party, generic parts that are readily available. Thus, for all sense and purposes, there is no real intrinsic difference between most of the PC products available. The only difference between different PC products was the speed and the storage/processing capacity. Furthermore, it is necessary to recognize that a great portion of the recent decline in PC prices, and the subsequent decline in PC maker profit margins, is directly attributable to the life cycle of the components themselves.", "Image XResolution": "37", "Image YResolution": "37", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "SlidePlayer", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered"}