It is a well known fact that companies that are the market leaders in one technology wave fail to catch on to the next wave. Usually these shifts happen with the advent of new disruptive technologies. Take the example of companies like Lotus, Word perfect, Apple, DEC, Ingres, and SCO to name a few. Every one of these companies failed to make the required changes to embrace the disruptive and discontinuous change.
Intel is the current Market Leader with Micro processor technology. Intel as a company has been doing a lot of thinking and investment in the area of “what is the next thing after semi-conductors? Can a multi-billion dollar semiconductor industry survive if a new discovery revolutionizes the whole computing industry?”

A Quantum Computer could solve a problem in few months that would take millions of years for a conventional computer. Using the principles of quantum dots, Quantum physics describes the special rules that apply to atoms and subatomic particles. One principle is that when you observe a particle, you change it. If a particle can be in one of two states, for example "up" or "down," it only settles on one state when you look at it. Before you look at it, it can be in both states at the same time. Conventional computers process information as "bits."

A bit can be a one or a zero. A string of eight bits can represent a single number from zero (00000000) to 255 (11111111). In a quantum computer, bits can be both one and zero at the same time. A string of eight bits can therefore represent all of the numbers between zero and 255 at the same time. (Source: Science daily)

Think of using atoms to manage states instead of transistors in a semi-conductor chip. This will completely revolutionize the way we have known about computers, all the billions of dollars invested in various manufacturing plants across the globe will be rendered almost useless and Intel the market leader in microprocessors will have to find something else to do.

Biological computing may be the next big threat to the whole silicon industry. You could possibly use biological particles like bacteria and viruses to control your state and use billions of them in a space that can only fit 1000 transistor today. Biological particles will not have the problems of heat, transmission and power that we have today, the system designed today can become more powerful tomorrow when the bacteria or virus replicate. All this completely changes the way we use silicon, the systems designed with bio-chips may be millions of times faster than the silicon based, there will be simply no match with the computing power. It is like using diodes instead of semi-conductors to manufacture PCs.

As we all know, patenting has become a very familiar task in the research landscape. One critical question remains: whether intellectual property is fundamentally inconsistent with the norms of research science. Although, we are likely to ask more questions around what sorts of research discoveries should be patented and about how proprietary research tools should be disseminated in the research community.
Intellectual property has been an important phenomenon in research science. According to me it is absolutely essential to preserve the benefits of intellectual property while minimizing interference with the progress of science.
When large corporations are investing so many dollars on research and often the goals of the competitors are similar. It is very likely the output will be similar or pretty close, then how does one really qualify infringement.
In the global landscape, the validity of the patent is largely questionable in many countries. Making sure you are protected in every country is often very expensive and some countries don’t have the intellectual property rights as in U.S. How does a corporation deal with global infringements?
I am not suggesting that corporations should not harvest IP, but in many cases they are going over-board with IP protection. Patent the core-technologies and the technology that is going to be market differentiators but not every new thing you come across.

One of my resolutions for this year was to start blogging more often. I found this interesting article that talks about the future of wireless technology, it addresses some of the issues of who pays for the WiFi connections. Wireless capabilities cannot be restricted to a confined boundary or location .. so how do you compete against free wireless service providers .. if wireless connections does become free then it become like internet where it will extremely difficult to force customers to pay. In my opinion Occasionally Connected Computing will become the norm with the cost of the bandwith will become so cheap that it won;t be worth charging the customers.

Techweb > News > WiFi�s Future: Paid Or Free? > Want Free Wi-Fi With That Latte? > January 14, 2004