Yes but back then they had someone who understood disruption much better (Andry Grove was friend with the author of Innovator's Dilemma) and they never had to change the x86 platform. They only had to create simpler chips on the same platform (Celeron, Atom, the initial laptop chips - forgot their name).

This time however, they need to change the whole platform, because the whole platform brings much bigger inefficiencies than ARM, and they won't be able to improve down that much, while ARM will improve fast at a steady pace.

The only solution is to buy a big ARM maker. To have a chance to dominate, they'd need to buy Qualcomm for Snapdragon, but they've just wasted 7 billion on an anti-virus...

But even if they do that, I'm unsure of their potential domination, as I believe in 2011 Nvidia will dominate the mobile market with its Tegra chips. That's because in 2011 the battle will be over who has the best GPU not CPU. The GPU is increasingly more important (accelerating the UI, the browser, Flash, supporting higher resolutions, gaming, etc)