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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (100492)	3/7/2000 7:50:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dan - thanks for your always interesting input. But let me clarify - there is nothing about Athlon that keeps it from running Win2K. But there is a lot about the consumer market which makes Win2K a bad choice - the hardware list is still rather small, many, many peripherals in common use including cameras, scanners, and printers are not yet supported. And of course many of the games in common use break on Win2K. Anyone who wanted to accept the constraints of Win2K's support model - say anyone who wants to use the machine primarily for business purposes and has Win2K compatible peripherals - could buy a presario... but why not buy a business machine like the Deskpro if that's where you're going, and get full Win2K support? Rather, it's just the line Intel has drawn. One of those backroom NDA contract negotiation things Dan, Dan - this is the CPQ consumer division, who has regularly told both Intel and MSFT to pound salt over the years... These are the guys who showed the Go OS on a handheld at Cebit last year. They almost single-handedly put AMD in the black and were responsible for 60% of AMD's Athlon sales. Your scenario might get some traction elsewhere in the industry, but the CPQ consumer division is one place which has a history of going its own way. When Intel slipped up on coppermine delivery, the Consumer guys shifted their whole high end product line to Athlon and gave their Intel allocation to the Commercial guys - DELL, who had no AMD products, had to suck bad air... I live about 20 miles from the CPQ Campus but I'm sure I would have heard the raucous laughter and ribald comments even here - "Invisible line? Bend over, I'll show you what I think of the invisible line!!!" and the like... GTW is a different story - unlike CPQ, they don't have a separate business unit for the consumer and commercial segments. But I think you're looking for shooters on the grassy knoll here. GTW is hardly in the Intel camp after what happened to them last quarter. Intel has to win business by having the best products at the best price, especially now... I can give you another example of Intel attempting to use their clout and failing - NGIO. Intel proposed a standard which would have "leveled the playing field" and given them a long term lock on I/O architecture. They got DELL and, amazingly enough, SUNW to back them. CPQ, IBM and HP developed a competing standard. In the end, Intel had to cave and do a compromise - those three vendors together just have too much stroke even for Intel to buck.