Tinkershaw,
That's a great response...and not just because it made the list of cool posts!
Nice way to handle that guy.
Thanks Chaz. After this I may need to open up a clinic for getting a post of the day. Make Tekboy my poster child ;)
As for the remainder of the opinions of the like of my take on rmbs is that it is a niche product. 5% of the market, maybe
I have been trying to find a post which was put on this thread sometime in early 1999, shortly before the Ericcson settlement with QCOM where the poster lost all patience and said (paraphrased) "Qualcomm is no gorilla I'm out of here." It was one of the most sad and ill-timed stock trading moves in history. Apparently this poster owned QCOM for some time and then just sold out just barely prior to QCOM's epiphany. I hope that poster bought back in, but since I never saw his name again, he probably did not.
In any event, I'll keep the above quote handy and we will see who is correct in a year. We shall just have to have events decide for us.
I'm not going to counter every article and cite brought up. The issues are very technical. The literature in the press and technical journals are a complete mess. And these issues have all been covered time and time again on the Rambus threads and are too voluminous to go on about. As a recent example that Intel quote about "Intel being a mistake." According to INTC IR, who were personally contacted by Fred Hager, the quote was taken completely out of context. In regard to the DDR releases, they keep popping up in the press but nothing seems to show up. Maybe this time it will be different. However these things are not real relevant.
This is the the beautiful thing about the gorilla game. We don't have to get bogged down in trying to decipher industry propoganda (which well over half the press on this topic is) from the real science and benchmarks, as opposed to the flawed science and benchmarks like on Tom's Hardware (who by the way has been sued by INTC or otherwise threatened to my knowledge). What we can do is instead analyze the industry. Who are the players. Where is the value chain. Where is the bottleneck requiring discontinuous technology. Is their a solution? A substitute to the solution? A tornado? etc. We follow the smart players, the money, their actions and we disregard the hype, bitterness, stalling tactics, industry propoganda, vendettas etc. In fact we embrace the politics and propoganda because viewing the industry through gorilla glasses we can decipher what all this jockeying means and get into such stocks at much lower prices than when the market finally figures these things this out.
As more developments arise I'll keep you all updated in regard to Rambus.
As a quick note to the merits of the pending lawsuits I do have two observations:
(1) under game theory the DRAM shops have to settle. If RMBS' patents are upheld and Micron, for example, loses, with RMBS' policy of not licensing companies who they beat at trial, Micron would be practically put out of business. Unless Micron's case is iron-clad (which it by no means is) Micron will have to settle. Their risks are far too high for a rational player to proceed all the way through trial (of course were assuming rationality here and no assumption is fool proof);
(2) Looking at the JEDEC count, from the evidence I have read regarding RMBS' involvment with JEDEC, the SDRAM count is rather weak. But if the SDRAM count is weak, the DDR count is much weaker. It appears that if the case did proceed all the way to trial that Rambus has a small chance of losing its ability to collect SDRAM royalties, but that the chances of not being able to collect DDR royalties are much smaller given the time frames that the standards were being designed and the time frames RMBS was involved with JEDEC.
As one other quick note regarding the context of the suit. It was Intel who actually brought the Rambus designs into JEDEC as proposals for SDRAM. Rambus really had little to do with it.
But lawsuits, who knows. I just know from following the gorilla elements with Rambus, and from what I know of the lawsuit, that like at the beginning of the year, the risk/reward on Rambus today is once again incredible.
I think purist gorilla gamers should probably wait for a final outcome of the current lawsuits to move in. IF Rambus prevails they will be the gorilla in the DRAM arena followed by moving in on INTC, AMD, etc. for even more lucrative controller fees, plus moving into the communication chip markets for which it has been stated that even greater value might exist for Rambus. There will be plenty of time for very risk adverse extraordinary returns over the next few years or longer.
However, for those who like to move in quicker, I really do think Rambus is looking a lot like QCOM looked prior to the Ericsson settlement. There are many striking parallels. If anything though, RMBS may be somewhat less risky pre-settlement than QCOM. This is because RMBS already has agreements regarding SDRAM, DDR and RDRAM royalties with about 25% of the industry and has already settled a lawsuit with a complete victory with Hitachi. There is some good evidence that RMBS' patents are indeed very strong. In addition no player in the industry is challenging the legitimacy of RMBS some 90+ patents. The only major issues at trial are (1) is RMBS in violation of antitrust laws (this is a very weak count) and (2) does Rambus lose enforcement of its SDRAM and DDR patents due to the JEDEC open standards process.
Tinker
disclosure: as if you didn't guess, I do own a lot of RMBS.
P.S. going back through the archives I saw some early mentions not only of QCOM but also NTAP, BRCM and a few others. A gold mine!
Bruce B has probably kept the thread up-to-date in regard to some of these but I'd like to also throw out AVNX and RBAK. Particularly RBAK which I am confident is a current gorilla combining both hardware and software with a horrifically blowing NGN tornado. AVNX, re-writing the optics rules, is just a candidate. Also IRF in power management. I'll see if I can come up with a report on one or more of these in the future. But whereas CDMA and the Internet were it in 1999 and most of 2000, I think optics and power management will be it into the next year or so. |
