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To: bob zagorin who wrote (15157)	12/15/2000 4:09:48 PM
From: lml	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

I agree, bob. I believe MSFT's misfortunes, along with INTC's are box related. I owned DELL a year ago. I didn't like all the selling Michael Dell was doing, and I didn't like their move into the corporate server area. I thought they'd be better served moving into the Internet appliance arena. I chose to dump the stock an 51+ on an intraday stop loss and never regretted it. Lucky me. In applying a Peter Lynch type of principal, I viewed my own habits of PC purchasing. My first PC was a laptop in the early '90s when I attended law school. Throughout the decade I was buying a new notebook PC every 1 1/2 - 2 years. Why? Because every 6 months to a year MSFT was coming out with more complicated, burdensome software that the PCs INTC microprocessor was not as effective in processing instructions, and consuming more & more RAM to the point there an a RAM upgrade was like tossing money down the drain. By the end of the end of decade I saw a definite slowing my need to upgrade my PCs as I had over the past decade. The reason? The migration from the desktop to the Internet. Consumers were upgrading only to improve the connectivity to the Net. Hence, we saw the incorporation of 56K modems and bundling of DSL and cable modem software for ease & ready access to the Internet. The PC industry was aware of a pending slowing in desktop sales for sometime now, but is now only coming to roost with the market. The bottom line of all of this is that IMHO, what MSFT is limited to the desktop and corporate LANs, and not necessarily corporate WANs and Internet functionality and access. Any slowdown in the latter, IMHO, will only hurt the organization, as Ellison correctly believes. The days of the Wintel monopoly are over. The box makers that were party to this conspiracy that was perpetrated upon consumers for a decade are now without a safety net. This paradigm shift is not limited to the consumer market as I personally experienced but also to the desktop IT spending you correctly point out.