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

To: Harry Soin who wrote (38901)	12/11/2000 10:23:52 AM
From: jopawa	Respond to of 64865

thestreet.com thestreet.com Spending IT: Lots of chatter Friday about Sun (SUNW:Nasdaq - news - boards), most of which was quashed by day's end. But it reminded me of something posted on the CC last week. (Lots of good stuff, in fact, is landing on the CC and not in this column so I intend to start bringing some of it over here, if ya don't mind!) I had been talking with longtime source (and money manager) Jeff Matthews, who was just floored by the significance of what Scient (SCNT:Nasdaq - news - boards) had said on its conference call after preannouncing a lousy quarter. He seized on comments regarding the cutback in IT spending not by dot-coms, but by real companies like Chase (CMB:NYSE - news - boards) and Wells Fargo (WFC:NYSE - news - boards). From the call: "Projects were either stopped, slowed or pushed to the right ... More enterprises have not funded projects that were considered discretionary..." That, Matthews says, is bad for the likes of IBM (IBM:NYSE - news - boards), Sun, Hewlett-Packard (HWP:NYSE - news - boards) and EMC (EMC:NYSE - news - boards), which are heavily tied to e-commerce and other Web applications. (He's short IBM, Sun and HP.) Add to that Maytag's (MYG:NYSE - news - boards) announcement Friday that it is refocusing its R&D spending away from Web-based and e-commerce initiatives. Maytag, it would seem, is not an exception. As an aside, I asked Jeff how Hewlett-Packard can continue to say all is fine with the world when all of its competitors are preannouncing. His response: "Carly [Fiorina] can claim that because she's very high up on a very narrow ledge. ... the same reason Mike Armstrong won't admit he's unwinding everything he did at ATT (ATT:NYSE - news - boards)." He believes she'll be gone from the company by summer. (And he didn't mind being quoted on that, which shows his conviction!) ...