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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (114)	2/27/2000 9:39:00 PM
From: KevRupert	Respond to of 6784

Worldfinance Palm IPO Projections: Company Symbol Shares Range Lead Underwriter Palm Inc PALM 23 million $14-$16 Goldman Sachs Maker of Palm hand-held computers, 3Com carve out Palm is the market leader in hand held computing devices sporting a 68% share for it?s award winning product line. It is plugged into 3 major market trends: portable hand held devices, Internet appliances, and wireless access. It also licenses it?s operating system to other portable device makers, putting it into competition with Windows-CE. As of December ?99, more than 5 million units have been sold and the firm has more than 29,000 third party developers building additional software applications for the units. Consequently, in the near term it should dominate it?s segment. The addition of wireless access services is expected to accelerate demand. Growth has been strong. Between F97 and F98, revenues surged 121.9% during early ramp up. In 3mF?00 the rate declined to a still respectable 52.1% given the size of the revenues, which are expected to reach the $931 million range in ?99. Unlike most IPO?s this firm has positive gross (43.4%), operating (8.4%), and net (5.2%) margins. However, margins have been declining and will continue with the development and roll out of wireless services. However, fundamentals are unusually strong for an IPO. As a first in their sector, comparables are not available. However, competition is expected from cell phones and a new generation of laptops & palmtops. However, their early leadership, strong share, increasing application library, and aggressive product development should provide a mid-term competitive advantage. Pre-offering demand has been reported to be extremely heavy. Despite the relatively large size of the offering, expect a very favorable initial reception (e.g., 100+%) followed by aftermarket appreciation. However, we expect the terms of the offering to be boosted substantially prior to the offering. In fact, an offering price in the $30 range would not be unexpected. Of course, any sizable increase in the terms will reduce the anticipated first day performance.

To: Ausdauer who wrote (114)	2/27/2000 11:13:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6784

I wouldn't trust anything from Barrons. I stopped reading it about a year ago. The reporting is horrible. I don't think they ever understood the idea of Journalism. Present both sides of an issue. They basically kill or kiss ass (shock sells ads). In both cases you have to ignore the other side of a issue. Someone on another thread ran down the Barron's articles and ripped them apart. I did not read the article. If the snippet you included is any indication, I would say it is the same old Barrons trash. A few examples: Barrons indicates a serious problem because two "leaders" left a year ago. Barrons did not point out that without them sales have soared, color has been added, internet access has been added and the business has gained independence via IPO. I want that serious problem for my business. The Barrons writer waves his hands in the air about 16 and 32 bit OS. Of course he gives no specific information because he probably couldn't write code if his life depended on it. He then wants to compare Sony Playstations with Palm devices. What does a playstation have in common with a 2-way wireless internet device? Sorry I don't have the url of the other comments from people that read the article. I think they were on Raging Bull. Barron's is worthless because you can't trust them to present both sides of an issue. Maybe it's the employment problem. Anybody that knows anything gets a job doing it.

To: Ausdauer who wrote (114)	2/28/2000 2:06:00 AM
From: lkj	Respond to of 6784

Ausdauer, You are right. The Dragon Ball processor from Motorola is not only a 16 bit processor, but also runs at very low clock rate. I believe that it runs at 16 MHz for most of the Palms and 20 MHz for a selected few. Motorola is working on a faster 32 bit version. Changing the Palm OS from 16 bit to 32 bit is not hard. Porting the OS to other processors is not hard either. It is a lot tougher to add all the features that Palm is planning. Already, Palm OS is being ported on to EPOC. (How come Barron's didn't mention this?) This means that the Palm OS will be 32 bit and support much faster processors. As for Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, I think their departures were better for both sides. They are entrepenuers, not billion dollar company managers. Just look at how Handspring has stumbled on its product launch and production. At the same time, one has to say that the Springboard is a great idea. This shows why Hawkins and Dubinsky is not well suited to run a company like Palm, but can be great visionars. What Palm needs to do at this stage is promoting the Palm OS as a platform, not manufacturing "cool" PDAs. That is Sony's job. Khan