<<Symbios will clearly benefit from the growth of the Xeon chip, and the commensurate growth of NT, which will become the standard on many individual PCs in the not so distant future. (Although I would hedge my bets because of Linux).>>
Jock, thanks for the very helpful summary of the conference call, and for your expert analysis of this company and industry. All of the factors you point to as potential growth drivers for LSI make perfect sense to me, except for NT workstation. Xeon yes, NT workstation, no. I don't see the growth in that platform occurring as others (including MSFT) have forecast.
A good example is a web server site log I analyzed yesterday. This log file was for a web site that will receive 100,000 unique user visits for January 1999. More than half of the traffic to this site occurs during work hours, and yet of the 100,000 user sessions, less than 4% were using Windows NT as the PC platform. Nearly 60% of the total used Win 95, 20% Win 98, with rest divided between Mac, OS2, Linux, etc. I was lucky enough earlier in the year to try Win NT and Win 95 on the same 233mhz, 64 meg RAM PC, it was astounding how much faster Win95 ran, and it was just as stable with 64 meg RAM. I think a surprising percentage of business PCs will run Win 95 for quite some time, even after Windows 2000 workstation is released (and the system requirements for it will be more onerous than those for Win NT).
Regardless of what happens with the PC platform though, you make a very strong case for future growth for LSI. Thanks again for taking the time to post.
jww |
