Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2000/02/09/chip_shortage_knocks_tosh_off/

Chip shortage knocks Tosh off top notebook slot

My, aren't these vendors so polite to Intel?

By Mike Magee

Posted in On-Prem, 9th February 2000 07:53 GMT

The latest Dataquest report for Europe shows that Toshiba, top dog in the notebook market since the man and his dog were a boy and his puppy, have been displaced by Compaq. The quarterly report from Dataquest, run in the Wall Street Journal, says that Tosh now only has 16.3 per cent of the market, with The Big Q holding 17.2 per cent. Just two years ago, Tosh held 30 per cent. The Dataquest analysts seem to be saying that Toshiba has been caught on the hop because it traditionally held the lion's share in the corporate marketplace, and had not realised that there is so much demand for notebooks in the retail sector. There are other reasons, however. When Intel announced its Pentium III mobile Coppermine parts last October 25th, we began to hear rumblings, and rather quickly, from major Intel customers, including Toshiba, that while they normally had something like two months to test these new parts, in fact they actually had two days to look at the new processors. As we all now know, these mobile Pentium IIIs have been in what Intel describes as a "tight" situation. (Tight has other meanings here in Blighty -- it means drunk as well as cheap, the latter may be more appropriate). AMD, as we have reported earlier, seems to be making waves in the retail sector in the US, and a company like Tosh, while it does now have some notebooks using these parts, may not have adapted to well to the shifting sands as Compaq. And where's IBM with its ThinkPads? It remains in third place, a position it seems to have occupied since the dawn of time, that is before Lou Gerstner started wearing the Big Blue boots. ®