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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (29246)	8/2/2000 1:24:15 AM
From: EJhonsa	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Thanks Frank. As you can probably see, my programming skills (or lack thereof) make those graphics something that's out of the question. That is, their market share is always an illusion, for they have no way to prevent the gorilla from coming in and snatching away their customers whenever it wants. I think that this might've been true about Intel in the past, but the recent DRAM wars cast some doubt on this situation. Intel's RDRAM push didn't go as smooth as planned, and they've had to announce SDRAM/DDR support for low-end versions of the Williamette (technically, they say they're still considering DDR, but we know what that means). It appears more and more that RDRAM's going to have to compete with DDR on its own merits, and just as Intel will tweak the Williamette to favor RDRAM, AMD will undoubtedly do the same to the Thunderbird for DDR. If AMD can outperform Intel due to DDR support, then Intel will most likely be forced to support it for future chips as well. And if AMD wants to continue to support DDR even though Intel discontinues support, it'll most likely find DRAM manufacturers willing to produce it for them, although economies of scale would be against them. None of this makes Intel look much like a gorilla. So I stand by my hybrid comment. Five years ago, now that might've been another story. Personally, I think Intel will win out here simply due to the superiority of RDRAM, but it looks like the gorilla lock they once had is gone. And if AMD's able to create a superior processor, they can easily make up for the fact that they lost the standards war, and I doubt that Intel could snatch away their customers whenever they want. Just my two cents. As for Cisco, it appears that Juniper and Avici are able to get by in spite of IOS, and like AMD, they make up for their standards weakness by means of having a more powerful product. Also, Tony Li, who masterminded IOS, currently works for Juniper, which definitely helps out with the compatibility issues. The fact that these companies have been able to penetrate Cisco shops such as MCI Worldcom, C&W, Enron, and Williams reflects this. It's not the "re-engineer their offers to restore 100% compatibility" part that I disagree with, but the "snatching away their customers whenever it wants" part that makes me look at Cisco as more of a hybrid. And once again, the final result of all of this shouldn't come down to company definitions, but to financial performance. It's the revenue, earnings, and market share numbers that Intel and Cisco put up that matter in the end, and determine how their shares perform. OK, I've talked too much. Time to go to sleep. Eric