John,
re: ""Also folks value the boxmaker as well IBM,CPQ,Dell are great computer brands as well."
Thats AMD strength, the box makers would rather have consumers buy a Compaq computer than an Intel computer. At this point, consumers want an Intel computer, because the box makers have no differentiation."
Well I think consumers clearly have a brand preference at the system level.
This is clearly shown by the increasing market share of the big brands at the expense of the no-name brands. This trend has been going on for many years now.
re: "Too many more cockups and we'll see Intel relegated to lower than AMD status - such as a willamette delay until 2001 etc."
99.9 % of consumers have never heard of Willamette, Coppermine, Merced/Itanium. They may have heard somewhere on the news that Intel fumbled on something, then they forgot it. Some of the IT pros may know about delays and "cockups", but will it really influence their purchase decision?"
In general folks are pretty knoledgeable except for first timers - which are a dwindling percentage. And I am sure most people have figured out the cumines and athlons are roughly similar. Once the cache goes on board Athlon in Q2 Intel will be severely behind in performance and crippled by high prices of RDRAM.
They need to deliver on Willamette to keep pretty even in high end or they are in BIG trouble.
Re:"It's a very hard job for AMD to win the end user. They need marketing excellence, making a huge impression for every dollar spent. So far, AMD hasn't demonstrated even a small amount of talent in that area. As bad as Intel is at marketing, AMD is worse."
Yup, it sure is hard. Q4 was the first quarter they tried some ads - with the silly train ad. We'll see what the results were in week or so.
And yes, they could both learn a lot from somebody great like apple.
regards,
Kash |
