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Strategies & Market Trends : A.I.M Users Group Bulletin Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sterlingmicro who wrote (15518)	4/4/2001 5:48:17 PM
From: aptus	Respond to of 18928

Hello CD, Thanks for the article link. I agree that INTC is a good long-term AIM holding. It has the right kind of volatility (at least historically) and is large enough that you don't have to worry that it will go away tomorrow if it makes a few mistakes along the way. I think INTC's main strengths are that: 1. They are the market leader. 2. They have a well-oiled marketing machine (I mean that "Intel Inside" campaign was pure genius -- who would have thought you could take something as deeply buried as a CPU and make everyone aware of its manufacturer). 3. Businesses have traditionally shunned purchasing AMD or other processors. But it all hinges on the fact that INTC has a large marketing budget and knows how to use it. AMD had closed the technology gap for some time now. In fact last year's AMD processors were superior to last year's intel processors. Intel's non-Pentium 4 systems still use a 133MHz Front Side Bus (which is the speed at which the processor communicates with RAM) while AMD had surpassed this speed quite a while ago. Now I'm reading results that AMD's athlon processors are performing better than Intel's P4s. My opinion is that it is only a matter of time before businesses start to view CPUs as commodities and purchase whichever one is cheaper or better. This won't happen overnight, but it will happen. IBM, many years ago, used to own the computer market exclusively in the business sector and they became quite comfortable and didn't adapt quickly enough to the new threats on the horizon (led mainly by the PC) -- because of this they went through a really rough period and were only able to bounce back recently. The bottom line is that I think Intel needs to innovate and move away from being just a "processor" company. I see that they're making strides in that direction, but we'll have to see where that leads. Just as microsoft is moving away from its traditional OS cash cow and into its .Net strategy, Intel will have to do something similar since the world is going to start moving away from the traditional PC centric view. I would be surprised if, in 20 years, people are still tied to their desks with a big beige box sitting beside them. Rather they will most likely have very small "invisible" computers to carry around with them. These "computers" will communicate wirelessly so that information is available at all times. If that comes to pass, then Intel will have to change very quickly or the smaller, more mobile startup companies will leave them in the dust. However Intel's advantage is that they have a lot of money and brand recognition. So if they use these things wisely, they'll have a huge advantage over everyone else. I know that Microsoft is using their money and recognition to try to sew up the Internet, and Intel will have to do something similar in their sphere of influence. And since Intel does have an experienced and smart management team, I think they'll be successful in the long run. What's more, we haven't seen INTC at this price for some time now. regards, mark.