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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rupert1 who wrote (71218)	11/7/1999 9:03:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 97611

victor - I can not possibly imagine what business benefit Michael Dell sees from this kind of bluster. CPQ is increasingly moving into markets where DELL can not go, likewise the others in the "big four". Statements from Gerstner and others are positioning the PC business as an increasingly weak segment, yet MSD increases the focus on that segment and makes public bets on how well he will do. I don't know if you read DELL's recent book, but it is essentially a warmed-over rehash of JIT ideas from the late 70's, with nothing innovative that I could discover. I got a strong dose of that medicine working with GM in the early 80s, the work of Demming and others was required reading, and the follow-up work around the strengths and weaknesses of the model were well understood even at that time. Most DELLheads have a poor grounding in the industry and their history goes back 5 or at best 10 years, they think that DELL invented these ideas. There has been an almost total absence of DELL bashing from CPQ since Pfeiffer left. It is almost as if MSD wants to get the fight going again, trying to goad CPQ into the same kind of irrational discussion that went on in '96 and '97. Maybe this is a cultural thing, uniting the company around a common enemy and clear message - "Get CPQ". Kemble on the DELL thread talks about MSD "suffering pain to cause much pain", a remark made apparently by MSD a year or so ago. Also Merideth and others at DELL saying "we can push the competition anywhere we want them to go". I sure don't see that happening. The trends in the PC industry were well understood in 1995, and only DELL (and to some extent GTW) are slow to adjust. Their "model" will prevail no matter what happens in the industry, I guess. Jim Kelley went so far as to suggest that DELL was eating Sun's lunch, when they have no products which compete in Sun's mainline. He offered up the 8-way Xeons as the DELL enterprise offering, never mind that DELL can not ship due to the Saber motherboard flaw... and the fact that the high end market is a Unix stronghold and DELL has no enterprise Unix - and the fact that the "magnet" systems are 64 processor today, going to 128 next year, and Intel has nothing bigger than an 8-way on the roadmap until 2003... But I'm preaching to the choir, I guess.