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

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (100518)	3/8/2000 10:08:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dan - re: Didn't exactly answer the question there, did you, rudedog? Not intentionally prevaricating but it is kind of hard to prove the absence of something. This is kind of a straw man argument - assuming that Intel was both able and interested in putting pressure on OEMs not to ship Athlon with W2K, we would see no Athlon systems with W2K, if the OEMs were influenced... My argument is that there are many compelling reasons why OEMs are not shipping Athlon with W2K which have nothing to do with Intel, and it would seem to me that pressuring the OEMs to avoid shipping W2K with Athlon does not seem to work in Intel's business interest, and does not produce a result which works to Intel's benefit... Intel may be a lot of things, but stupid ain't one of them... First, to answer your question directly, I do not know of any major OEM shipping Athlon with W2K. But Midwest Micro will ship you an Athlon-based system with Win2K - go to mwmicro.com and pick configure... Second, there is no particular business benefit for Intel in keeping W2K off Athlon that I can see. I suppose one could say that W2K is the "business" OS, Intel wants to hold tight on the "business" pc market, so they would resist any trend which might increase competition in that space. But business buyers are overwhelmingly buying Win98 SE today, which is on every Athlon box. Intel would be playing a very long game indeed if they were projecting forward in time to a point where W2K is the dominant business OS (maybe mid-to-late 2001) and trying to bias the market to favor Intel at that time by locking AMD out of that space now - seems pretty far-fetched. Finally, the notion that Intel would cut some "back room NDA deals" to influence OEM choice goes against everything I have seen them do for years... They employ a range of incentives and disincentives to get OEMs to favor Intel, but those are pretty broad based. A company which wants to base a product line in integrated Intel components (motherboards etc.) can get engineering and marketing assistance from Intel to do that. A company which wants help to push existing Intel products can also get help from Intel. Intel has occasionally withheld advanced deep engineering information from companies which produce competing processor products - like IBM and Compaq - but the gating factor has been agreements about IP and patents, rather than any overt pressure around product line content. I just don't see Intel's reach extending far enough to bias the product configurations of companies like IBM, HP, or CPQ... those OEMs are pretty savvy and they pursue their own business interest relentlessly. If offering W2K on Athlon gave them any advantage, I would bet that they would go there in a heartbeat.