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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (2948)	6/22/1999 9:17:00 PM
From: Apollo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Stan, Thanks for your thoughts about Rambus. How do you respond to the suggestion that Rambus's business is based on Intel's tornado rather than its own? --Mike Buckley Mike: I firmly believe Intel's sponsorship has accelerated acceptance of Rambus. Intel's blessings in '97, '98, followed by Dell & Compaq in '98, followed by Sony in '99 has had a snowballing effect. Moreover, Intel, like Johnny Appleseed, has been spreading seed(money) around the memory manufacturers ($500 million to Micron, for example) to help jumpstart their purchases of the necessary equipment to help ramp up Rambus memory chip production. Rambus has needed Intel, but the reverse is also true, which is that Intel needs Rambus. Mark Edlestone has stated this, as has Intel. Yes, Intel could go to another alternative someday. But for now, there is no other alternative. Like MSFT, Rambus hopefully will continue to improve its designs and they may win out as the standard for a long time. Presently, there are no viable alternatives. Intel needs Rambus. Using Moore's terms, I think Rambus has just about crossed, but is not out of the chasm, in that no one (save Nintendo) has adopted Rambus technology. The tornado begins later this year when progressive adoption of DRDRAM occurs, first in high end computers, then in lower end PCs, and workstations/servers, and Next generation Nintendo & Sony games. By then, adoption should be headlong and frenetic, as no vendor wants to be left behind. Moreover, I think my colleagues from the Rambus thread make a good point when they say that, maybe not right now, but soon, new applications (speech recognition, video and audio streaming, and some not yet imagined) that are entertaining and memory-intensive will be available and demanded by all users, including computer newbies. I think that even I, not a computer whiz, fully appreciates the "need for speed" with professional multi-tasking and more rapid downloading of web pages, etc. which I have seen with memory upgrades and maximization. I suspect that computers will someday be simple to use, so the other 50% of Americans can buy and use one......when that happens the simpler a computer is to use, the more complex and memory intensive the internal guts will be. Just my .02; thanx for asking, Stan