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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (120999)	12/6/2000 10:09:36 PM
From: jeff_boyd___	Respond to of 186894

"Flipping a coin" The basic drivers of the PC business at a very high level are easy enough to understand. Innovation drives the need to upgrade and Intel's monopoly assures high profit margins. My basic question is are these two facts changing for Intel? If they remain true, then the price decline creates a good buying opportunity. When it comes to evaluating whether or not these two facts are changing, yes, I have to rely on the opinions of those I respect and that is why I am here. I may not have the terminology right, but I understood everything you said as anyone who works in an office does. Should I and the vast majority of people who do not understand the technology behind it not buy technology stocks? Many sharp people who understood the technology had strong buys on Intel at $75. At the end of the day its a coin toss for everyone. I'll go away soon enough Mary. I only come out when the debate doesn't cover issues I care about. Jeff

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (120999)	12/6/2000 10:26:21 PM
From: WTSherman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

<The workstation I'm referring to are those terminals that are tied to a network and interact with servers (NT, Unix, or S390 type)and the work they do relates to transaction processing. Many of these applications require that each workstation process 20 or 30 transactions an hour. Many of these transactions have to go through edit or validation processing wherein each time the enter key is pressed and hundreds of instructions are performed using many I/O functions the computer must return control to the client computer. < I beg to differ... The facts are quite clear in regard to the corporate market. The previous trend of 30-36 month replacement cycles for desktop PC's is now stretching out to 42-48 months for machines that are 500Mhz and above. For desktop applications there is no appreciable advantage to using a much faster PC. For enterprise or departmental applications the overwhelming majority of the response time is related to the server and the network. Moreover, the trend is for everyone, but power users, to use browser interfaces as the interface with these applications, whereby the client PC is little more than a dumb terminal. Also, the incremental value of improved performance is not nearly as great as it was a few years ago. A 50% improvement means a lot more when the process is taking 5-6 seconds per transaction than it does when the process is taking 1-2 second per transaction. Lastly, the previous replacement cycles were driven as much or more by the costs associated with HHD and memory upgrades to old machines(needed by new windows apps), as it was by performance improvement from new ones. These are no longer major concerns thanks to the exponential decreases per unit of cost of storage and memory in the past few years.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (120999)	12/7/2000 12:04:02 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: . The workstation I'm referring to are those terminals that are tied to a network and interact with servers (NT, Unix, or S390 type)and the work they do relates to transaction processing Hi Mary, I think that the systems you are referring to here are more often called clients, thin clients, or terminals in the context of comparing hardware. Of course, a workstation can be a desk with pad of paper on it and no electronic device of any kind, but I think that usually the subset of computers differentiated into the category "workstation" for discussions comparing hardware boxes are Unix and NT/2000 machines. I agree that at many installations, the largest single limiting factor is network bandwidth. But not at all installations, and the network bandwidth is still useless without something at the other end. Just because the greatest single need at a number of locations is an expansion of network infrastructure, doesn't mean that Intel and AMD can't continue to make lots of money selling CPUs, just as it doesn't mean Exxon can't continue to make lots of money selling gasoline. Companies buy lots of things. Regards, Dan