Opinion Chinese multinational Huawei has revealed its plans to use its entire product reach to dominate the marketplace from mobile phones up through the desktop to the server level. Oh, and smart everything too, like motor cars and robots.
Last week, in Shanghai, your correspondent attended the Advanced Intelligence conference and attended a number of keynotes. You can find some of my coverage at Fudzilla.com.
It was pretty impressive stuff, and the keynotes spelled out the future.But the one chink in Huawei’s armour, in my view, remains the channel – its route to market – which is still dominated by Intel, apart from at the mobile phone level. In fact, as we recall well, the then Intel CEO Craig Barrett dissed smartphones, even though it had the chance back in the 2000s to dominate that market too.
Last week I saw Huawei’s production line for its P30 Pro that seemed to bang out one unit every 32 seconds.
When we interviewed Huawei’s chairman Guo Ping at its Shenzhen campus last week, he was insistent that X86 based servers were the best for some applications while ARM based servers won on other fronts. Ironically, he mentioned Intel’s floating point X86 abilities as one of Chipzilla’s strengths. Some that are older in the tooth will probably remember Intel’s problems with the floating point.
At stake, however, is Intel’s reaction to any firm that seeks to sap its vital strength. Jamie Minotto, the then CEO of PC firm Tandon, told me in the 1990s that the last thing anyone should do is to step on the tiger’s tail. That tiger is Intel and it’s far from nearing extinction.
What about operating systems and applications? Well, the Harmony OS, Guo told us, spans the entire technology gamut too. Applications? Huawei is putting billions of dollars developers’ way and I don’t know about you, but on the desktop I use Microsoft Word, sometimes Excel, and I avoid PowerPointless like the plague.
I am no Huawei fanboy, but I do think there are lots of opportunities for the channel to take advantage of the shape of things to come. I’ll be at the Canalys Channel Forum in Barcelona in October, and will pose those questions to vendors, to distributors and to dealers. Box shifting is so out of date that it’s almost retro. Which is fashionable!
