Intel sales and profits fall in third quarter. The Post PC market brings substantial changes to the hardware landscape.

As you may recall, three years ago we wrote here about the PC Sales Cycle which was the way how Microsoft periodically renewed the market for its hardware partners and application software partners, letting them to earn approximately 18 dollars for one dollar which Microsoft earned on Windows. This was an excellent strategy that gave Microsoft the power to manage the computing market for 20 years and catapulted it to the position of the biggest IT company in the world.

Now, when the PC Cycle is over, the market for PC is logically declining. It now faces two problems:

1. There is no more a tool that periodically renewed the entire PC market, 
2. Serious competition from growing segments of consumer electronics, namely tablets and smartphones. 

Among the affected is also the world's largest and highest valued semiconductor chip maker Intel. Intel is similar to Microsoft in the way that also its business heavily depends on PCs and doesn't have big enough share in the growing segments of smartphones and tablets. Read more in my today's comment on Start2Cloud.com