Some retailers, like Ace Hardware, rushed to reopen stores and stock them with everything from extra batteries to mops and cleaning supplies, said John Venhuizen, the company's president and chief operating officer.
They have run through the stock of weather-stripping and insulation supplies at some hardware stores, rushed to fill their heating tanks before prices rose again, and signed up for contracts that guarantee a steady supply of oil at a fixed cost.
Social enterprises such as The Restart Project in London are working to change our relationship with electronics: a relationship where we keep our gadgets for longer and repair older hardware rather than rushing out to buy the latest shiny item.
The new hardware has been rushed into service as a preventative for the kind of chaos that prevailed in Miami, Palm Beach and other areas of Florida after the Gore-Bush election.
Lisa Stamatin, a manager at Keough's Hardware, described a similar rush.
If software developers are going to join what Oracle's ads call "the new gold rush," the hardware suppliers have to develop machines that make customers feel like prospectors, not tools.
Ultrabooks – Thinking back on the great netbook debacle of a few years ago: the rise in popularity, the fall in pricing, and their eventual death, it's not difficult to imagine the ultrabook is phase two of the hardware-maker's lemming rush.
"People aren't going to rush to buy hardware if there isn't anything much to watch," she said.
An unexpected blizzard hits an area and people rush to the hardware store to buy a shovel.
De facto a standard was in place, and the expectation was that hardware vendors and software companies would rush to adopt it, developing a big telecomm equipment market where everyone's products worked with everyone else's.
