1.   Next refused to comment on reports that it might abandon its hardware business altogether.

2.   After nearly a century in the holy hardware business, a fifth generation of Kaufer is now being groomed to eventually take over the shop.

3.   All this was accomplished while Simons was managing a household for her husband, Sidney J. Simons, who owned a hardware business, and five children.

4.   But Apple is subject to the same brutally thin profit margins as the rest of the computer hardware business.

5.   Companies are lining up to do just that, as profit margins fall in the hardware business.

6.   Competition in the computer storage hardware business is much more intense now.

7.   Computervision, which writes programs used in product development, agreed in September to sell the hardware business to J.F. Lehman as it shifts its focus to software.

8.   Even though the hardware business comes with additional risks, Egghead hopes to tap into the current consumer trend of buying software when and where hardware purchases are made.

9.   Gerstner said the networking hardware business, though, must improve further.

10.   He would have realized his little hardware business was broke.