> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus

> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers. If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard. Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.