Rise of the flat panel

Apple Computer did as many predicted and introduced an all-in-one iMac built around (or, rather, into) a 2-inch-thick flat panel display. In the bigger picture, though, it's just one more milestone in the rapid growth of flat displays from niche product to technological mainstay, as the Wall Street Journal notes:

From a small segment of the computer-peripherals business, flat-screen production has grown into a sizable industry at the center of a global struggle for high-tech dominance. The industry is spending tens of billions of dollars building manufacturing capacity.

In contrast to the role Asian high-tech companies have traditionally played as the low-cost builders of other people's innovations, the region's flat-screen makers sit at the lucrative center of technical and product development, influencing the design of electronic products just as chips do.

And the screen industry is setting the agenda for scores of related businesses world-wide, from chemicals makers in Germany to electronics retailers in the U.S. Flat-panel makers have even started to underwrite graduate-studies programs, creating a research infrastructure and future-employee pipeline common to other large industries.