To understand the ascent of mobile, think about this: Qualcomm, the wireless chip maker, just surpassed the market value of Intel, the titanic microchip company of the computer era.

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Intel isn't having much success keeping its upcoming Bay Trail-era Atom platform under wraps.

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Intel's Andy Grove set the tone for this exciting, frightening era when he called his 1996 book Only the Paranoid Survive.

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Intel, he pledged, will invent the chips that can help usher in this new era.

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Remember, this was the mainframe era, and these were dumb terminals, not the fat clients built on Intel processors and Microsoft software in use today.

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But look at all the new companies that came out of that era and changed everything: Microsoft ( MSFT), Apple ( AAPL), Intel ( INTC), etc.

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To put this in perspective, during the PC era (which lasted for 20 years) this would have been the equivalent of combining Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Best Buy into one firm, selling one brand.

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Using this, developers will come up with apps that can "introduce themselves, " automatically installing themselves on 1 or 100 servers at once using the Internet-era language XML. Such automation and, of course, the power of cheap chips from Intel is supposed to be the last nail in the mainframe's coffin.

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