Skeeter, your memory is selective on this issue. Seasonality data were published immediately.
cpq stuffed the channel in 1997. they did it in 1998. the comparison is NOT meaningless.
Yes, but it is still meaningless because we don't know, and won't know to what extent this happened for a few quarters.
This is the game I was objecting to that Burke was playing: If company in a two company universe, if company A reports 10,000 sold and company B reports 10,000 sold, and the following month company A reports 15,000 sold and company B reports 12,000 sold and company A report an increase in market share of 13%? Suppose sales in the following quarter are 9,000 and 14,000 units respectively. Has company A lost market share in the last quarter, or is this a reflection of inventory slowly being sold through the channel? That's why Gabriel and I argued vociferously for annual numbers.
We won't know what things really looked like for another quarter (I am assuming that it takes CPQ a couple of quarters to work excess inventory off). You just can't base this stuff on very short intervals. And that's what you guys have been doing.
Finally: so, for all the boxes coming out this year, boxes came out last year, too. I don't recall the upgrade from pentiums to PII coming out just after Christmas. As I recall it was late Spring of '97. I think CPQ got a double whammy because it stuffed its channels and got caught in a product transition.
TTFN,
CTC |
