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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: QwikSand who wrote (37883)	11/16/2000 4:38:41 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Respond to of 64865

FWIW, I was watching streaming quotes as I listened to the call, and my impression is it started to drop precipitously almost as soon as they said "no change" almost immediately after the start of the call. I can only assume somebody was looking for some big announcement -- i.e., "change!," or that they had decided in advance to sell regardless of the call's content. Charles Tutt (TM)

To: QwikSand who wrote (37883)	11/16/2000 4:39:32 PM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. When a stock goes from price X to price Z, it is because of the changes in the buyers and sellers and the prices they are demanding and offering. Those changes do not have to be uniform over time, i.e there is not a constant rate of shares coming onto the market at ever decreasing asks. Praps someone has been thinking of selling and today was the day the order got placed. On the other hand, maybe there is some news. I don't know of any specific catalysts for today's action apart from a general return to value and good sense in the market. If u r in SUNW for the long term and are not on margin, I am sure this decline will not b a major problem.

To: QwikSand who wrote (37883)	11/16/2000 10:56:48 PM
From: cfimx	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

fyi from wsj 11-14-00 Dot-Coms Won't Die Alone By Paul Kedrosky, a professor of business at the University of British Columbia. Lost in the hand-wringing about the death of dot-coms is that their demise is creating a larger crisis that threatens to blow a hole in all technology spending. It will have implications far beyond the frivolous world inhabited by self-refuting companies like Pets.com, Priceline and the rest. But no one talks about it. The media are having too much fun watching so many improbable economic life forms meet their maker. And it's understandable. After all, it is a little like a teen horror flick: You know most of the them are going to die; the fun part is seeing how they go. They certainly have staged some entertaining exits. Some just disappear like a good magic trick. For example, Mambo.com, an online invitation site, shut down last week without so much as a formal goodbye. One day they were there, and the next day they were gone, replaced by a typo-filled message to the effect that the party was over. Other companies have been less abrupt about it. They kept going down into the basement and coming back out alive, finally to succumb. Pets.com has recent pride of place in that group. The company came back repeatedly from the brink of disaster, before finally dying last week in a plaintive-sounding press release that brought out the punster in every headline-writer in the country -- "Pets.com put to sleep." Still others hover on the edge of disaster, teasing us with imminent collapse, but somehow finding a way to continue. Think, for example, of the formerly celebrated folks at Priceline.com, of "name your price" and William Shatner fame. The company lost a good chunk of its senior staff in recent weeks, and most of its market value. Some of the departed executives have been entertainingly candid in saying how little sense it all made to them. The former head of Priceline's auto services business told this paper on the way out the door that selling cars over the Web turned out to not be a particularly good idea. The company's ex-chief financial officer unconvincingly said in another exit interview that she didn't think leaving a cushy Citigroup job for Priceline's baffling business was "a big mistake." Reading between the lines, it seems a reasonable bet she thinks it was at least a small one. But dot-coms aren't the only ones to be tarnished. The best and the brightest at venture capital firms around the country are having to suck up some major losses for their ill-advised forays. While many were simply opportunists grabbing onto a passing financial train, others supposedly knew better. It is now apparent that they didn't. Recent restructurings at dot-com financier CMGI, and the withdrawal of the troubled Idealab public offering, prove that incubators, far from adding value, are arguably dangerous. The pinnacle of venture capital is occupied by firms like Hicks, Muse, Tate & First and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. The former's dot-com troubles apparently forced it to do the unthinkable: Skeptical investors have made the firm guarantee returns of 20% or better in a new venture fund that it's currently flogging. The latter firm has done no better, with, for example, its high-profile investment in MVP.com, an online sporting-goods retailer. One investor in the company recently wrote off its stake, and there are persistent rumors that MVP.com is searching in vain for desperately needed capital. Seduced by improbably high and speedy returns, venture capitalists turned into Hollywood producers. They introduced more high-concept eBay-meets-the-Cooking-Channel nonsense in the last 18 months of the dot-com mania than Golam-Globus (producers of "Death Wish 4" etc.) managed to do in years of equally cynical high-concept filmmaking. Unlike in Hollywood, or in slasher films, the damage isn't going to stop here. It will extend from the current business-to-consumer (B2C) collapse to business-to-business (B2B) companies. Attrition rates in that over-funded sector could approach 90%. Dot-com spending also fueled the growth of online advertising companies like Doubleclick and Engage. Those companies have already suffered from that tap being turned off, losing billions in market capitalization, with their share prices off more than 90% over the past eight months. The people who build dot-com websites are being ravaged too, with companies like Razorfish, Organic and Sapient seeing their revenues look weak. Not far behind them will be Internet market svengalis, companies like Forrester Research, Media Metrix and Jupiter. Who can afford those expensive Internet market research services? And what's more, who needs them? Next up, and most troubling, will be the infrastructure providers. Companies like Sun and Dell are dangerously exposed to the dot-com capital expenditure crunch. And so is Oracle, whose database sales (and share price) were juiced in recent years by dot-coms frantically setting up sites to (unsuccessfully) flog their wares. Even hosting companies like Exodus won't escape unscathed. Its business has benefited immensely from the VC-driven munificence of buy-first, think-later dot-coms spending their sugar-daddies' capital. So the collapse of dot-coms threatens to remove a major spending plank from the information technology industry. It remains to be seen what many companies -- and the markets -- will stand on without it.