A couple of good articles over the last few days on low cost technologies impacting industries in different ways.
Apple Takes On Intel, from Forbes, covers Apple's use of their own chip in their new iPad tablet computer. The article describes the trend towards cheaper and easier to use technology:
"One of the fundamental rules of technology is that things that start out hard and complicated, able to be tackled by only a few people, eventually get easier to do, allowing more people to handle them."
It then describes chip design as an example. Instead of buying chips from Intel, AMD or Qualcomm, Apple designed their own chip and is having it manufactured by contract chip fabricator. This same approach is being used by small technology companies.
Another good article on this trend is How Falling Prices Has Created Video Ubiquity from GigaOm. The title pretty much explains the article's content (thanks to Franz Dill at the Eponymous Pickle blog for the pointing this article out).
Both articles discuss the 2nd order impacts of this shift. For Intel, it means a customer is now a competitor and increases the probability other customers will choose to build their own chips.
The GigaOm article discusses a mix of "transformational" impacts caused by video ubiquity, including changing IT requirements and major impacts on bandwidth and device providers.
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