Chuzz, I know that 1-9 are things that investors are looking at but they miss the real drama. There is a business process revolution occurring that some businesses are completely missing. Case in point is CPQ (clueless and dealing with Dell who has implemented the new commercial processes). In Andy Grove's comments below he says that "a wholesale re-engineering of the commercial processes of the world," is occurring and he compares the shake up to his company's switch from producing memory chips to microprocessor chips. This is no easy feat, Dell has done it, CPQ, IBM, HWP have not.
End result of the revolution in underlying business process once implemented are speed to market with new products, low cost production, customer sensitivity (timely), business flexibility, able to expand into new markets quickly, just to mention a few.
This current stock price dip is from investors who have missed the whole point of CPQ's trouble and Dell's incredible future.
Cheers
Mike
Intel's Grove Tells Editors To Embrace Technology
By Duncan Martell
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Since Andrew Grove gave up the title of chief executive last year at Intel Corp. -- the company that perhaps more than any other has set the pace for personal computer era -- he has had plenty of time to think.
After all, that's his new job. And Tuesday, Grove told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in San Francisco, what changes to expect from new technology.
Forget thinking about which element of technology is most important -- hardware, software, the network or people's mindset about technology, says Intel Chairman Grove.
Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors here, Grove, a 62-year-old American business icon, said to look at all these elements as part of a larger change.
What industrialized nations are undergoing, particularly the United States, is nothing less than "a wholesale re-engineering of the commercial processes of the world," Grove told the national gathering of American newspaper editors.
That means that soon every electronic blip, every story read on the Internet, every book bought and airline ticket bid for online will be reduced to a transaction -- the instantaneous exchange of money or information.
Grove, who helped shepherd Intel out of its darkest days in the mid-1980s when Japanese memory-chip makers nearly put it out of business and the man named Time's Man of the Year in 1997, says businesses should pay heed.
"This is a huge, huge change," Grove told the group of editors at the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill in San Francisco. "It is analogous to the introduction of the electronic motor. It's going to affect all of us."
Though some say every device in the home will be connected to a computer network, Grove dismissed that notion.
"I'm of the belief that you don't want to talk to your refrigerator," Grove told his audience of newspaper editors.
Whatever the case, Intel and other technology companies such as Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Cisco Lucent Technologies Inc., as well as others, are being called upon to provide technologies and solutions that will someday tie together worldwide commerce in one vast network.
That mandates reinvention, and Intel has already done so once. It bailed out of a business it invented -- the memory chip business -- and plunged headlong into microprocessors.
By 1986, Intel's revenue had shrunk to $1.27 billion compared with a peak of $1.6 billion in 1984 and, in the same two-year period, yearly profits of $198 million had reversed to losses of $173 million. But by April of 1987, Intel posted a profit of $25 million. To celebrate through a "back-in-the-black party." Its fortunes had turned.
"It was a horrendous experience," Grove said, of the transition to the microprocessor business. "We had to change the mindset."
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