Over at CNN Money, David Goldman reports on Intel slashing its sales forecast due to circumstantial disaster. The Thailand floods earlier this autumn have wreaked havoc on hard drive manufacturing. Set aside the annoyingly obvious question of why it was considered a good idea to build such factories in a flood plane and consider the ripple effect. Could Intel have predicted that their sales would be contingent upon where someone else built their factory? I suppose they might have.
More importantly, is anyone taking note of this circumstantial effect on a whole industry due to one sector's questionable decisions? Certainly, many within the data center industry are taking note, though not many companies can do anything to prevent such ripple effects. It makes me wonder which other industries we rely heavily upon might have such built-in weakness due to clustering of manufacturing facilities.
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