Re: "Jerry has done his job properly. If I had told you two years ago that AMD would be selling microprocessors to every tier one except Dell, you would have laughed at me. AMD has overcome ALL of the SIGNIFICANT challenges in this area. Thanks to AMD's sales and marketing, AMD sells every chip that it makes."
If this is a business and if you can't make any money you have failed, by definition. Jerry has pursued a personal vendetta which is OK I guess considering it's Jerry's own private company and he can do as he pleases. However if this company beloned to the shareholders, the sign of a successful CEO would be one who makes decisions based on enhancing shareholder value. Looking at a 15 year chart of AMD's share price (down over 50%) I would say that as CEO Jerry is a total, complete and utter failure. That is if this company belonged to the shareholders.
Re: "Thanks to smart marketing, AMD now has kept the K6-2 to effectively "pin down" the Celeron while the K6-III goes and competes with the higher margin PIII. This way, the K6-III won't drift downmarket and become a Celeron competitor. Soon the K7 will be here, and luckily I am not worrying much about AMD's ability to sell it. I do have to worry about AMD's ability to manufacture it, though."
Not surprisingly you make no mention of profits, but you don't need to now do you? Profits would only matter to shareholders. As long as AMD can hurt Intel the business plan is working.
Re: "The failure to execute on the manufacturing side is why the company has not outperformed. There isn't very much Jerry can do about this, other than do a better job of managing investor expectations."
"not outperformed" hey... now that's a new and novel was of saying "dramatically underperformed". You're right though, Jerry should be more forthright. Instead of saying "We're Baaaaaack", and "the yield problems have been fixed" (how many times now?) and "profits are coming", he should have been straight forward and said "we're in the toilet and we're going deeper. Yields suck, we're just about out a money and I need a new Limo. That's why we're laying off 100's of you suckers and about to restructure. I gotta keep this ponzi scheme afloat long enough to do another public offering so find me a K7 we can keep running for a few minutes and do some kind of a demo. That'll keep those dummies happy till I can think up some excuse why it's gonna be delayed."
Re: "What Elmer and Engel don't get is that K6 is only round one--did they really expect AMD to knock Intel out in just two years?"
No there was the 286 and the 386 and the 486 and the K5 as well. With each generation the losses get bigger, but there's always so much potential.
EP |
