ANALYSIS TECH WARS >>>


identified as an ideal candidate by Apple co-founder Mike Markkula, who felt that Jobs himself lacked the temperament needed to run a company on a day-to-day basis. However, the Apple board of directors had other ideas, and ordered Sculley to ‘contain’ Jobs’ creative impulses. Rather than submit to this


containment, and holding Sculley responsible for raising the price of the Macintosh from its agreed price of $1995 to $2495, Jobs attempted to oust Sculley from his role. However, the board of directors sided with Sculley and Jobs left the company to form NeXT shortly afterwards. Jobs’ tenure at NeXT is often


referred to as his ‘wilderness years’ but actually saw the release of a number of innovative – albeit not very commercially successful – products. A NeXT Computer owned by a researcher called Tim Berners-Lee became the world’s first web server. 12 years after Jobs’ departure, and with its stock languishing in a three-year record low slump, Apple bought out NeXT for $429 million and ousted its own CEO in favour of Jobs. Within a year, the company had


released the first iMac and a few years later had developed the Mac OS – derived from source code created at NeXT – and released the iPod. The rest, as they say, is history.


Internet Explorer vs Netscape, 1995 In 1995, the internet was just coming into widespread use and the browser of


Microsoft vs Linux, 2000 Very few technologies have been likened to communism, but that’s exactly what happened when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer commented on his rivals at the end of Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting in 2000. “Linux is a tough competitor,”


stated Ballmer. “There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”


26 PCR January


choice was Netscape Navigator, which held over 80 per cent market share and was free to non-commercial users. However, 1995 was a watershed year


as it saw the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which was released as a free update for Windows 95. Internet Explorer 2 followed a few months later and held a single key advantage – it


IBM


was free for everyone to use. A technological arms race ensued.


Netscape fared well at first, introducing JavaScript for the first time, but the release of Internet Explorer 3 offered scripting support and the first implementation of CSS. The tides turned in Microsoft’s


favour with the release of Internet Explorer 4 in 1997, which was released as an integrated component in Windows, meaning that many users bought a new PC with Microsoft’s browser already installed. The day after the launch of Microsoft’s latest browser, Netscape employees came in to work to find a ten-foot tall Internet Explorer logo on their front lawn. The prank marked the beginning of the end for Netscape. Unable to compete with Microsoft’s vast resources and dominance of the market, Netscape was acquired by America Online in 1998. Following its defeat, Netscape put its browser into the care of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.


Nvidia vs 3Dfx, 1997 In 1997, 3Dfx’s Voodoo 2 graphics card was one of the most popular components on the market. The firm had been a pioneer in the graphics sector throughout the mid-nineties, but was about to face one of its biggest challenges in the form of a relative newcomer to the market – Nvidia. Nvidia took the market by surprise with the release of its Riva TNT graphics card, which had been greeted with dubious scepticism at its announcement as people didn’t believe the claims over its performance. But perform it did, and 3Dfx struggled to compete. Voodoo 3 failed to impress customers, as it lacked many features that had become standard, including 32-bit colour and resolutions higher


than 256 x 256. The release of the Riva TNT2 was the nail in the coffin for 3Dfx’s dominance, offering better performance than any other card on the market. This was then hammered home by Nvidia’s unprecedented six- month refresh cycle, which saw the subsequent introduction of the GeForce range. By the end of 2000, 3Dfx was staring bankruptcy in the face and was acquired by Nvidia.


Intel vs AMD, 2003 Having pushed itself to prominence in the early years of this century, AMD managed to pull ahead of its rival Intel in performance terms with the release of the Athlon 64 processor in 2003. This triggered a rivalry that spilled over from technological competition and into the courts as the two companies vied for the technological lead. Initially, the battle focused on


increasing the performance on a chip, and then shifted to how many processor cores a chip could carry with the release of the AMD Opteron and the Intel Pentium 840 in 2005.


Apple


However, things changed in 2006. Intel began to pull ahead after shrinking its dies from 90nm to 65nm and by the end of the year had created the first quad-core chip. AMD, having recently purchased graphics specialist ATI for a total of $5.4 billion, struggled to keep up. It deployed its first 65nm processors at the end of 2006 and released its first quad-core processor towards the end of 2007. However, a few months later, Intel


had already shifted production towards 45nm and AMD was again lagging behind and facing a seemingly insurmountable gap. Meanwhile things were heating up in the courts, with anti-trust allegations being made both in the US and Europe. Things seemed to cool for a while


following the Hector Ruiz’s departure from AMD. His replacement, Dirk Meyer, not only settled the anti-trust lawsuits, but also created a spin-off firm in the form of Global Foundries, a manufacturing division based in the Middle East, which freed up AMD to compete on research and design. However, things could soon heat up


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