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It's not just the last decade

Does anyone remember ViiV, or explain what exactly it was?

just looks like centrino or the multimedia PC standard: a basket of technologies (and like centrino/ultrabook, all intel ones) that define a standard for media PCs and set-top hardware that would support a certain distribution model.

now of course a lot of people didn't get what centrino was either (or what vpro is today!). it's a little hard to market these hardware standards when it's not something obvious like "the multimedia PC standard" that consumers grok. But it's the same kind of idea: we're going to need X, Y and Z hardware and feature support to do this workload or customer use-case. If your PC has it, then it's Centrino/Ultrabook/whatever!

But again I think it's true that people respond more intuitively to the idea of branding the product and not the platform. "Ultrabook" or “Multimedia PC Level 3” makes more sense as a concept to people than "Centrino" or "Viiv".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook

Centrino was an absolute slam-dunk success that did significantly bring x86 laptop computers forward (it may not be complete hyperbole to say that the Pentium M is the most important Intel CPU of this century), but in some ways it became obsolete by its own success: As all laptop manufacturers followed and gave us Ultrabooks that were amazing, Centrino as a brand didn't become a differentiator anymore, and Viiv just wasn't offering anything important enough - though the brand made perfect sense, given how hot Media Center PCs were for a short while.

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