OK Intel fanatics, what's a poor Intel wannabe shareholder to do? For you already holding the answer is clear - hang on. But what about newbies?
Yes - Intel apparently has, and for some reason has historically mostly had, a lowish PE given their monopoly like position, and in comparison to other chip makers PE, and given the of late awesome earnings, and given the awesome product developement that soon (merced)if not already is going to whoop an IBM mainframe of not long ago in a lot of areas.
But I have to ask if this product development is going to find a market of the scale we are used to, at the premium price.
Me for example. I'm sitting here at home with a pentium 100. What do I use it for: 70-90% internet, some letters, occasional game, occasional spreadsheet, occasional attempt to work at home (a pain since all the files are at work). Do I see anything at present to want to make me shell out another $2000+ for a pentium II or higher. Nothing in sight. I hope to use this machine for at least 5 years so as to stay solvent. I really don't even need a pentium, just a faster modem. What would I reccomend my friends for home use: go cheap on computer, get good modem, you'll probably be happy, spend the rest on a vacation.
At work. I probably rate as a power user in the average office (at least most I've worked in) as I run moderate to large database analyses on occasion, and sometimes GIS/database theming/modelling. A pentium 166-200 is pretty good for this with a decent video card. Yes there are some anoying lags waiting for things to execute which add up over the day, and a machine 2-5X faster might allow real multitasking (ie. database crunching in the background, with a reasonable speed interactive session in the foreground), and fewer overnight runs needed, but I know it's going to be tough to talk the boss into upgrading when we just got the pentium class chip not so long ago. Most of us will probably have to wait until the price/perf curve comes down at least a little or to about where the pentium is now.
The upgrade cycle has always been a worry, It's just that at present, it FEELS like there could be less urgency with people wanting to upgrade (ie a velocity slowdown in the cycle). Will upgrading save the corporation $$$, or make their lives easier, its hard to see that at the desktop it will right now. I suppose there are higher end power users that will have to upgrade to a pentium II now, but is it going to be as urgent as say 486 to pentium, which was a good move even for average office workers, given the bloatware being run for spreadsheets and wordprocessing. I guess it depends on the future of software bloatage, and on Intels success with driving down the cost of fast ethernet, video conferencing (how many of us are going to be doing this at our desktop?), etc. Videogames - for $250 I can get a dedicated MIPS 64 bit chip, Nintendo 64.
There is no such thing as a bad stock, just a bad price. The PE looks very attractive given the possible future prospects. I guess given the PE not a lot of growth exuberance is built into the stock, so any future problems may be taken in stride by the market. Unless the recent E part of the equation won't be sustained, ie. Intel has to cut price to draw in users like me and drive out AMD, at near term profit slowdown. What does anyone think about this. With this last part overall I'm talking myself into maybe buying - risk reward ratio doesn't seem too bad. |
