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

To: Bob Howarth who wrote (84158)	12/24/1999 7:27:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1574326

Bob, These surveys of the top tier makers severely underreport both the direct sellers and the thousands of screwdriver(SD) shops. It is quite likely that the SD shops outsell the collected sales of the top tier makers, even including Dell. I took part in such a survey a few years ago with my 5 stores along with many major makers in Canada. For a year a fieldman would come to my place and count what I has sold, monitors, systems, drives etc. and he went to the others and after a year we got this thick report. A friend of mine was the main distributor of Panasonic in Canada and each system has(usually) one floppy drive. This simple metric can be used to measure systems on an approx 1:1 basis. CPUs the same. I showed him this report that purported to be a Canada wide survey of all top tier OEMs as well as retail chains(but not single stores). He told me that he sold more 3.5" floppies that these top tier people sold computers!!. OEMs buy direct. We do not export them to the USA, so each goes 1:1 into a computer. His main markets were the SD shops through his 4 warehouses in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, hundreds and hundreds of them. Now in the USA the same metric applies. Count the CPUs, or floppies and you have the number of computers made. I see quite a discrepancy between the CPUs made by Intel/AMD and the number of systems sold by the top tier people. Sure some are made offshore and sold there. Even so I suspect there are errors. Other metrics like the number of people who have a home computer, the average life of such computer, the CPU etc need to be measured with more precision. I suspect we will see a market flattening during the coming year as saturation sest in and we may never again see the nice 20-30% increases we have seen in the past. In addition to saturation the capabilities of machines have become so good that older machines will serve most modern apps. Games are an exception and they continue to drive that segment into needing faster/bigger etc. Offices have flattened and are buying $500 Celerons/K6-2/3 in large numbers. Workstaions are still driving higher. But Games and workstations are not enough, especially since the Sony and N-64 systems will intrude into that market and take a large share. Part of this is due to the MSFT monopoly. Their domination in office stuff that runs on $500 celerons/AMD K?? means that those buyers will not buy Athlon 800/P-III-800. This means a severe shrink will occur. Web TV will be all low end from via/intel/AMD with concommitant low margins. So what will drive this economy next year? I think it will do OK, some better/worse than 10%. But those heady 30%....gone from Intel/AMD in sum total. AMD can still rob Intel of share by being better/cheaper/in stock/etc. Bill