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

To: chic_hearne who wrote (110319)	5/10/2000 9:18:00 PM
From: 5dave22	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578015

<Really my name is not chic hearne, I just envy the Lakers announcer> I hope you know that I knew that. I lived in LA for 10 years. That said, I still want the Pacers to win it all this year! My wife has a friend who is VERY bullish on IBM over the next few years. I might have to pick up 100 shares and just hold it. I think IBM and GTW are two of the best B&H stocks on the market (along with AAPL, GBLX and MSFT). I love AMD and hope for the future but I still think I can't NOT watch that investment every day. That's why I love this thread! Dave

To: chic_hearne who wrote (110319)	5/11/2000 10:37:00 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578015

Dear Chic: I think that a large part of why IBM doe not get as many sales as it used to is the level of support has declined greatly. I wrote applications for some large companies running on AIX and Oracle. There was problems with the stated APIs to the OS (defined by Spec 1170). IBM gave us (the team) the run around for 2 weeks claiming that the problem was not in the OS. After finally talking to the persons who write the libraries, a bug was found and the problem was fixed. The short of it is that service is given to third parties for hardware and software and it is not kicked upstairs to the REAL technicians and programmers in IBM itself until some cockup or customer raising hell occurs. This is not the IBM of old (the one customers liked and respected) where if a problem occurred, 1 guy who knew what he (or she) was doing was assigned the problem in the first hour. If it was not fixed that day (or in another hour for Mission Critical Apps), a whole team was assigned. If it took more than another day, it seemed that IBM sent everybody. That was IBM service in the early 1980s. IBM sales people used to have much more technical knowledge and had a technical person to talk to to prevent the undersized or wrong product situations you described. This comes from management "save a penny now and losing a dollar of profit later" short term mentality. It now seems that there are many companies in this mode, HP, DEC (Compaq), SUN, Lucent (Old AT&T), and USR (3com). This focus on short term profit and not long term potential, is one of the disquietting trends in this marketplace. It causes many technically adept companies from realizing their true potential. It is also one of the ways a company can take an entrenched market leader (by giving better service and support (read handholding)). Pete