I don't think I'm going to change any minds, and am not trying to. I don't have a position in RMBS, so I really don't care.
This is the way I see it:
Sometime in the mid 90's, Intel saw DRDRAM as the future of memory.
Rambus, trying to stay on good terms with everyone, chose not to file lawsuits over DDR and SDR because they believed DRDRAM would be taking over making the other memories obsolete.
Things didn't go as planned. There's no denying DRDRAM should have much more market share than it currently does if things worked the way Intel and Rambus were thinking a few years ago. [not my opinion, this is a fact. If you look at press releases and roadmaps from a few years ago, you would expect DRDRAM to have more marketshare than it does]
It takes anywhere from 18-24 months to make a chipset. Therefore, if Intel was going to abandon DRDRAM, the decision wouldn't hit the consumer for about 2 years. It looks to me like Intel will have non-DRDRAM chipsets for the P4 mid next year, meaning the decision was made sometime in 1999.
This makes sense given that Rambus started all this lawsuit nonsense this year. They must have caught wind they were being phased out and lawsuits are the only way they can fight back.
Anyone that has seen roadmaps from the Dramurai knows exactly WTF I'm talking about. If you saw them a year ago, they had DRDRAM taking over late this year and taking over 75% of the market next year. If you've seen them recently, DRDRAM will peak mid 2001, just when DDR for the P4 comes out. Then they are phased out in late 2002.
Therefore, the whole company depends on winning lawsuits over DDR and SDRAM because the industry has already decided they are through with DRDRAM. Of course it's not apparent now because of the 18-24 month delay of designing a chipset, but it will become obvious soon.
This is why I refer to Rambus as a Boiler Room stock, ala Farrow Tech. Geoff Tate and everyone else in that company knows what decisions Intel has made. When you see them touting their stock they are lying. I'm not sure about the ANALysts. Either they are dumb or they are in on it also.
EVEN IF I AM WRONG, I have been told by many in the memory industry that the next memory technology (whatever it is) will be designed in a way that Rambus can't get its hand on any royalties. This is years away, but since this market seems to discount into the future, it's hard to say how this will affect the stock later on.
JMHO,
chic |
