For instance, in 1995, 10 megabit-per-second Ethernet switches dominated that market; last year, the two most popular switches operated at rates of 100 and 1,000 megabits per second. Product lives for semiconductors and computers can be even shorter; some computer models have remained on the market for only a couple of months.
In such an environment, the availability of detailed micro-level data describing the attributes of these goods is crucial. One means of defining the unit of output is to unbundle the characteristics of a high-tech product and to price each of them separately. This so-called "hedonic" technique - now 1 applied by the BEA to items that account for 18 percent of GDP--is one approach.