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To: dwayanu who wrote (2056)	1/12/2000 2:32:00 PM
From: Winston Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

This is where the management comes into play. NTAP's management was hand picked by Mr. V to thoroughly and completely dominate the NAS sector from day one. The mission statement of this company is to carve out a sector (like Cisco) and OWN IT. The determination of this company is just incredible. Your descriptions of a big company with a lot of money jumping in is quite possible, but it will take huge resources to compete with NTAP. And I might add, that the competition will drain a lot of brain power and a large amount of money, it is entirely possible, it could take the focus away from the core business(es) of this big company.

To: dwayanu who wrote (2056)	1/12/2000 2:45:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

Copying NTAP's hardware architecture is a piece of cake. Its all off-the-shelf stuff. The stripping of the mother board simply reduces points of failure, reduces mfg costs, and creates a high margin item. NVRAM is even simpler. NTAP is a software company. Features of its software are patented. Creating software that performs as well as NTAP's would require improved concepts of storage, retrieval, recovery, clustering, etc. And these concepts would have to be bullet proof from patent infringment claims. The same can be said of CSCO as I just said about NTAP. Could CSCO be overcome by a deep pocketed competitor in a couple of years?

To: dwayanu who wrote (2056)	1/13/2000 3:57:00 AM
From: kas1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

> I don't think it's likely that any competitor will appear > in the next couple of years, but if some big > company thinks the NAS market is big enough Except the case of technologies protected by patent, this is the best *any* company can hope for. Thinking that "anyone could do this" would have dissuaded you from some very profitable investments in companies like Cisco and Intel over the years. While barriers to entry are an important thing to look for, we shouldn't expect to find real, visible brick barriers awaiting our inspection -- if anything, the companies would hide such barriers, for fear of DOJ wrath. imho only of course :-)