Earlie, your opinions are interesting. But I doubt much of what you say will come to bear (no pun intended <g>).
CPQ will not get into the inventory crisis of 98 again. They learned their lesson.
INTC will continue to eat AMDs lunch. Celeron does perform on par with equal speed PII, but it hasn't slowed PII sales yet. Corporate purchasing agents feel safer with 400-450 systems. And very soon they'll feel safer with 450-550 PIII at not much higher total system cost. And Rambus is not a problem but a necessity for high end workstation and server performance. The memory bandwidth bottleneck is key to those huge database apps that don't get much in the way of cache utilization; ie, NT WEB server performance. And the smooth answers will be well received because they have merit.
Dell a big question mark? The likelihood DELL missing the quarter is same as Clinton being removed from office. When, and if, DELL misses a quarter, it will be preceeded by a warning well in advance. This quarter, no warning, no miss. In fact, I would expect DELL to have a blow out quarter on the bottom line, so-so on the top line. And like previous quarters, the stock will drop 10-15% and present a great buying opportunity. Geez, the stock is up 42% ytd. So a little pullback is necessary. But with worldwide market share at only 6.2%, this company still has a looooong way to go.
I agree that MSFT has blundered the case. And they would be well advised to settle. But the DOJ won't do it now. They want the jugular. But will the government break up MSFT? Hah. Into what? Two monopolies? <g>
Meanwhile, out in the real world, the PC sales "melt" continues.
I guess I have to stick with the "herd" on this point...
Gary |
