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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (83517)	12/18/1999 3:42:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1585479

Cirruslvr, Alpha lacks the critical mass to make it on it's own outside of it's captive niche. Compaq may make and use many of them, but it may not sell well elsewhere. Is this due to AMD?, NIMO, it is due to the fact that it is a separate platform with little software for it. Will this change in the future? NIMO, there is little new stuff beinb written for the Alpha. It will carry on with unix/linux and will share it's niche with AMD and Intel within CPQ. The threat from AMD is probably a year or so away because it takes quite a while to certify a product in server space, so even if AMD had a 8 way chips and mobo ready tommorrow, the adoption would be gradual. Intel will tolerate the Alpha and just let it fade away...they hope. I am not sure how much time and money CPQ will give to the Alpha division to keep it current into the future. Did they not try to kill it once already? As to CPQ/Humble. Their manglement team was over tiered and under free to innovate. decisions that Mike dell would say....good..do it in a few seconds to months or years. Innovation from below was stifled by the old boy network where cronyism ruled. Favourite cronies, who knew NOTHING(apologies to Clnl Clink), literally ran Compaq into the ground. They stayed loyal to their dealer base....a nice Texas touch...but not viable. Had they seen what was going on sooner they would have been better off. CPQ has always made good stuff, too good for best economic sense, built like a tank, and weighs like a tank, with cost overuns. Dell stduied all sapects of his product and engineered fast snap together assembly into them. CPQ had those funny screws, etc. Once the commoditisationn was complete there was no way to choose between Dell and CPQ in the market, other than price. Dell cost less, weighed less, was easier to service, was just as reliable....easy decision. Bill