First, Intel's stock price IS human, it's actually low for their earnings. Now if you want to argue that the earnings are inhuman, that's another story .......
Second, I actually feel less bad about the Cyrix situation than about the DEC situation. Cyrix is suing on May 13th for a patent that was just issued on May 13th. They just resolved a trademark issue with Intel over MMX, but unlike AMD, they did not license the actual MMX technology, they "cloned" their own. They know that Intel is working on MMX 2. They know that Slot 1 is patented and they can't design a chip that plugs into it without violating Intel's patents. There is a good chance that their own MMX has compatability problems with Intel's MMX (even if undiscovered). My guess is that Cyrix is hoping that they can prevail, and in exchange for allowing Intel to use the two subject patents, get access to genuine MMX technology, MMX 2 and Slot 1 technology from Intel. It would be a good deal for Cyrix. Intel's tact would probably be to try and show that the Cyrix patents are invalid, based on general practice, published prior art [even if, perhaps, unknown to both Cyrix and the US Patent office] or not unique enough to be patentable. But even if Intel lost, this could clearly be settled in an equitable way via a patent and technology cross license agreement. Further, since the patents on which the suit is based were just issued today, it doesn't have the "smell" of the DEC suit, which attacks products that have been on the market for four years for infringing DEC patents that in many cases predated the supposedly infringing products by five years or more.
Another option for Intel would be to drag out the length and cost of the court fight with Cyrix and beat them down by attrition. Cyrix is in no financial condition to fight with Intel if Intel puts its full resources into the fight for the sake of fighting. Normally, Intel might do that, and I would agree that it's not the most fair of tactics. The timing is on Cyrix's side, however, and I think that under the current situation, Intel would rather settle with Cyrix if it loses a fair but fast court fight, and devote all of its energies to dealing with DEC. I don't, however, think that Intel will settle with Cyrix unless it believes that Cyrix's case has merit. |
