What's Happening in High-Tech Supply Chains
By Staff -- Purchasing, 3/21/2002
- In spite of the negative economic climate, Bluetooth chipset shipments reached 13 million for 2001. Cahners In-Stat has downgraded expectations for 2002, but still expects Bluetooth chipset shipments to grow rapidly in 2003 and beyond reaching 780 million units by 2005.
- If the personal computer is dead or dying, it certainly isn't evident yet in the U.S., which has more PCs per 100 inhabitant (nearly 60) than any other country, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Europe, in contrast, has only 17 computers per 100 inhabitants. Analyst Ben Macklin at eMarketer.com suggests that people predicting the demise of the PC may be misreading the recent falloff in PC sales, which may be caused more by the current economic cycle than the availability of Internet appliances.
- The U.S. has the lowest percentage of households—1.5% of 106 million—using alternative devices for Internet access than other industrialized nations, says a new Commerce report. Only 7.6 million U.S. households have alternate Internet access devices—Web-enabled cell phones (5.1 million), Net-enabled personal data assistants (1.9 million) and interactive televisions (600,000). By comparison, more than half of Japan's 70 million cellular phone subscribers have Net access via handset.
- A group of technology companies has formed the Organization for Internet Security (OIS) to establish standards "to ensure that security and software vendors can more effectively protect Internet users." Founding members of the OIS include Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Symantec Corp. and Network Associates.
- Oracle Corp. has joined numerous software firms in suggesting a pickup in business for the downtrodden industry sometime this spring. Rivals Siebel Systems, SAP and other large software companies that sell mainly to corporations have issued similarly optimistic views for 2002. None, however, see a return to demand levels seen prior to the dot-com meltdown. The firms are working off excesses slowly because many big projects remain idle in this time of corporate belt-tightening.
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