Lenovo Group, the world's fourth largest maker of personal computers, believes that the recent market developments will bring a lot of new opportunities for hardware and software businesses. Unfortunately, the success of far not all important technologies can be predicted.

Intel Corp.'s-funded development of MeeGo operating system for mobile devices, dramatic increase of performance of ARM architecture-based microprocessors, support of ARM by desktop flavours of Windows and emergence of innovative mobile products inevitably marks the beginning of always online era, which is sometimes called "post-PC" age. According to the chairman of Lenovo Group, this new epoch promises to bring a lot of innovation and mark the end of certain ecosystems.

"We find it rather exciting in this new era we're going into that it marks the end of the 'Wintel' monopoly. It offers more room for innovation and choice of OS and CPUs. I think there will be more types of platforms. Right now, I think (the combination of Windows and Intel chips are) still the best choice for enterprise machines, but I think gradually the distinctions between consumer and enterprise machines will also change," said Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of Lenovo, in an interview with Cnet News.

The blurring borders between consumer and enterprise computers is evident these days, but could not really be expected even five years ago. For Lenovo, just like for any other huge technology company, ability to predict such things is needed in order to survive.

"When you are in the field of high tech, there is no telling when a dark horse might come out of nowhere with a new technology or business model, so we will likely encounter some setbacks, but it will be temporary. The most important thing is to have a strong cohesive leadership team that has the culture that will allow it to survive these setbacks and keep innovating and go its own way," said Mr. Chuanzhi.

Tags: Lenovo, Windows, Intel, MeeGo