Bill, er Mike, good piece you have here:
A recurring theme As long as we're talking about great
companies, I want to make a couple of comments about Intel.
Intel (INTC) is now 0 for 3 in the new chip department. The
Celeron was a total flop, the Merced chip has been delayed
indefinitely and now there are some problems with the Xeon chip.
There is an article about this in the New York Times, and Intel
says that they won't comment on chips/products because the
release date for this is supposed to be the 29th of June. Yet at
PC Expo, about a week ago, Paul Ottolini - head tout - was
chirping about the Xeon chip. He said, among other things, that it
would set new performance records. So they don't mind
commenting when they have something good to say, but they
definitely don't want to comment when things are bad. I, myself,
have been very disappointed with the way that Intel has handled
their problems. I think they have been less than forthright with the
analyst community and investors at large about the problems
they're having, given what I have known about what's going on in
the company compared to what they've publicly admitted.
Stand and be counted Condoning this sort of behavior
(playing different types of accounting games and engaging in
promotional activity), sets a bad example for Corporate
America. There doesn't seem to be an elder statesman in the
investment community...sorry, in the corporate investment
community. There are only a few companies whose word and
credibility seem to matter. All this is going to come back to haunt
companies down the road when things aren't going well and they
need credibility. They won't be able to get it because they were
unwilling to tell the truth when things started to go sour. Obviously
that's a moral judgement on my part, but I'm just unbelievably
disappointed with the performance of these corporate chieftains
who seem to pay more attention to the stock price than they do to
the business. While that may be fun in the short run, in the long
run if you worry about your stock prices instead of worrying about
the business, you'll get yourself in a soup just like Intel's done.
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