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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (161874)	10/6/2000 8:34:39 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Bill - Zim should have said homogeneous - or the cost of heterogeneous. But the rest of his points are well taken. CPQ uses 100% Intel in their commercial PCs. They obviously have the technology to do an AMD version, since more than half of their consumer machines use AMD. CPQ also has no particular dependence on Intel - they are Intel's largest customer, but they crossed the AMD bridge a long time ago. CPQ is, we hope, not adverse to making money. So why not do as you say and bring out an AMD based commercial machine? HP and IBM are also 100% Intel in their commercial lines, although like CPQ both offer AMD consumer products. GTW has no significant penetration in large commercial accounts. The reasons for this are exactly as Zim says. I have not worked much in the PC end of the business but I have spent a lot of time with corporate decision-makers who determine things like PC procurement policy. The big buyers want machines that are either identical or exactly compatible upgrades, over a period of years. They write contracts to enforce those commitments. This is not some dumb choice on DELL's part - it's the only choice that works in the market where most of DELL's business comes from. Between DELL, CPQ, IBM and HP, you have pretty much covered the options for large deployment commercial systems, and those systems are 100% Intel. The requirement for stability and predictability outweighs the WHOLE cost of the hardware, not just the difference between AMD and Intel processor costs. This will be a tough nut for AMD to crack.