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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: edamo who wrote (133066)	6/16/1999 10:28:00 PM
From: Sig	Respond to of 176387

<<<< Sold the splits to have a negative cost basis including call premiums and still holding 30k long>>>> Brilliant strategy IMO, buy for the split, sell upon the split It used to work even better in the past,although some months ago a few of the roaring techs would continue to go up after the split but that was probably a distorted market. Sig

To: edamo who wrote (133066)	6/18/1999 11:57:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Count Your Blessings that You Own DELL Instead of Compaq... edamo: Check this article out...SmartMoney doesn't seem to be much of a believer in CPQ at all -- and I can understand why <G>. <<June 18, 1999 Compaq Has Met the Enemy -- and It's Compaq By Tiernan Ray TALK ABOUT dysfunctional. You have to be pretty light at the top to be doing as many important things as Compaq Computer (CPQ), and still manage to screw it up. After Thursday morning's conference call with press and analysts, in which the Houston-based computer maker announced that it would miss the expected 20-cent profit per share in the second quarter and instead report negative 15 cents, the impression some came away with is that of a great company held captive by feckless management. A glance at the various initiatives Compaq has going suggests PCs are the ball and chain dragging down a lot of hard work. It's standard operating procedure, of course, to get the bad news out right after the last CEO is booted out the door, in order to clean the slate for incoming management. But it doesn't sound much like Compaq was opening the kimono, as they say, on Thursday's call. Don't ask, don't tell sounds more like the tone. What's most immediately obvious is a certain diffident, obstinate attitude among senior management, especially founder Ben Rosen. "It's the same old Compaq," one market researcher told me after listening to the call, lamenting the ongoing tendency in Houston to deflect blame and avoid the hard questions. "They're talking about the industry slowdown, while clearly Dell [Computer (DELL)] is doing well," said this observer. On the matter of whether Compaq was again stuffing the distribution channel, "They're not saying if it's so," this source relates, "but they're also not saying that it isn't so. They're just not answering the questions directly." And that trend goes deep. In a research report Friday morning, Steve Milunovich with Merrill Lynch notes that while revenue growth is slowing, operating expenses increased by about $700 million. Milunovich writes: "Management 'agreed' that operating expenses were too high, but did not elaborate on how they got so high, other than an inadequate cost structure." It's tempting to assume that once someone takes the helm, the hard questions will receive direct answers and the ship will right itself. Clearly fixing the PC problem is a pressing issue. Data from International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass., show pretty clearly the first-quarter decline in market share, with Compaq dropping from 18% of PCs sold in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 1998 to 16.1% in the following quarter. Dell, meanwhile, climbed to 14.7% from 12.8%. It's unclear what sorts of changes the second quarter will bring, though they can't be good for Compaq. Compaq's reorganization, outlined on the conference call, doesn't sound like much. It doesn't explain how management will stop the slide in PCs from constantly upstaging all the good work Compaq is doing in other areas. The firm has partnered with Microsoft (MSFT) to develop computers that can replace the phone systems of Lucent Technologies (LU) and Nortel Networks (NT) inside corporate offices, for example. And it is moving more and more into the important area of storage management, where EMC (EMC) holds sway. And the company is now (finally) talking up its assets in the telephone market with the introduction last week of a slew of products that can be used by carriers to build new services. This is an area where Sun Microsystems (SUNW) has done a lot of work to change its image from that of beleaguered workstation vendor to telco supplier. Compaq management, take note. All of these are very important initiatives. They will begin to take Compaq into some really important strategic markets, and they make me think there's lots of potential in Compaq that's not being appreciated at the moment. But management also needs to pull these disparate areas together and get its story straight about what kind of a company Compaq is going to be. The mess with personal computers is not only costing the company money, it is making it hard to focus on what's right at Compaq these days. I suspect part of the problem is Compaq's tendency to think about itself as just a computer company, namely the second largest computer company after IBM (IBM). Call it Rosen's IBM obsession, the tendency to define the company in relation to what Big Blue does. Well, it'd better exorcise that particular demon, because the stakes in the telecommunications revolution, and in areas such as storage management, are too great for Compaq to be living in the realm of past challenges. I hear over at IBM, even the lowliest gear-head is heard to remark, "Compaq? Yeah, it's their turn in the bucket.">>