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

To: edamo who wrote (163050)	12/4/2000 10:07:15 AM
From: mepci	Respond to of 176387

Ed: Seem to be the following is the priority items that will determine Dell's success for 4Q, and on which we don't know much of any positive news: 1. commercial WS. 2. Servers. 3. Laptops(should be ok). 4. Storage. 5. Ventures. 6. Option transactions. No news may not be good news.

To: edamo who wrote (163050)	12/4/2000 2:20:44 PM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Ed, I need some help <ggg>. I'm easily confused these days by my hero, Michael Dell. Earlier this year, he told me he saw a strong upgrade cycle being driven by 'WIN2K'. Now, at the CSFB tech conference, he says the following below. I just don't know what to believe anymore. This is worse than when Bill said 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky'.... Regards, John Downbeat Mood at Tech Conference By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Dec. 2 - Michael Dell just came out and said it. ``There haven't been a lot of great reasons to buy a new computer,'' Mr. Dell, the chairman of the Dell Computer Corporation told a group of investors here this week. Jeffrey Weitzen, president and chief executive of one of Dell's rivals, Gateway, put it another way, the day after his company shocked the market with news that sales and profits would fall far below forecasts. ``Do you really need a gigahertz processor?'' Mr. Weitzen said during an interview here. ``We're finding people don't need that. The drive for speed is no longer what it once was.'' Neither is the drive for online retailing, said Shelby Bonnie, chief executive of the technology news service, CNet Network. "People have way oversold the e-tailing space." The doomsday declarations were uttered at the annual technology conference sponsored by the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, which seemed to be ground zero this week for the implosion of investor confidence in the information technology sector. The conference's organizer, Elliott Rogers, managing director and head of the company's technology research group, said as much: "Suspicions of problems have been confirmed. It's like getting hit by a 2 by 4." The conference, a weeklong open-microphone session for chief executives of technology companies, coincided with a particularly heavy pummeling of the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index, which fell nearly 9 percent this week. And the 2,000 or so investors here seemed to divide their attention between the Nasdaq and the 200 technology chiefs who found themselves here not to praise their companies but mainly to explain themselves. The message from many was consistent, if it sounds a bit desperate at times: The drop in their stock prices was simply part of a correction - an over-correction, they insisted, and not a reflection of the fundamentals of their businesses. And yet, there was no getting around the evidence that the stock-market correction coincided with an actual slowdown in some key segments of the technology industry. It is not news that the dot-com industry is in the dumps. But now, so is the semiconductor business. ``You've got Intel and AMD on a suicide mission to make the fastest chip,'' Mr. Rogers said. AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, is Intel's main competitor. Fast chips, for now, anyway, may be beside the point. Computer makers are now saying their main source of revenue will be accessories, not the computers themselves. They are recasting their business plan along the lines of the time-honored practice of giving away the razor and profiting from the sale of blades. Gateway, for example, is hoping to grow by emphasizing a broad range of training packages and services for PC's, as well as electronic devices that can be linked to the Internet or networked in a home. But the troubled industries go beyond makers of PC's and PC chips. The Internet consulting services industry is gasping for air - notably MarchFirst, which this week forecast a fourth-quarter loss of perhaps 30 cents a share, instead of the seven cents a share profit analysts had expected. The software companies are not exactly booming. And various hardware companies are trying to figure out what a slowdown in the telecommunications industry will mean to them. Each in their own way, the industry chiefs seemed to be asking the same questions: Is my rivals' problem going to become mine? Am I really in a cyclical business? Is the new economy subject to the same ebbs and flows as the old economy?