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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Fahmy who wrote (65197)	7/24/1999 5:31:00 PM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Fred, re: Using the internet to sell more PC's is a no-brainer IMO. When every maker is an ISP, I expect price learning curve's on that service much as with hardware. No commodity business's enjoy lucrative margins for long. Got to be a long term problem for the independents, especially AOL. JMHO

To: Fred Fahmy who wrote (65197)	7/25/1999 11:59:00 AM
From: Joan Osland Graffius	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Fred, >>Most successful companies are always looking for ways to grow their businesses. This is an interesting concept, but certainly has not been 100% successful. Some examples are companies that have strayed from their core businesses. Back in the 70's Harvard was instructing businesses to diversify-diversify-diversify, and they did. This turned out to be a disaster for a fair number of companies. They were getting into businesses they knew nothing about and in the late 80's the companies that were still in business using this great advise, started to dump these unprofitable businesses. I was with Honeywell during this time and they scrambled just in time to get back on track. They were lucky to have a CEO that could lead them through the transition as well as they got lucky. Another one of my perceptions is that when the core business of a company starts to diminish in growth etc., they start scrambling for new businesses. My perception is when a company starts doing this a large percentage of the time it is the beginning of the end. I agree that some managements are capable of transiting a company from one business area to another, but I am having trouble coming up with a name in the high tech area. I suppose we could look at GE surviving when the light bulb became a commodity, also RCA did survive for a long time until GE bought them with petty cash. I don't have any answers as to what is going to happen to these companies that are tied to the PC business as it goes through its transition to a commodity, or is replaced by something we do not know about at this point in time, but I know a whole bunch of companies that did not make it through the last change in this industry. Some names that come to mind are Sperry, Control Data, DEC, (GE, Honeywell, Bull), etc. All these companies scrambled to survive by running to service businesses, but were not able to lead the change over time. Joan