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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mitch-c who wrote (50510)	8/14/2001 3:46:26 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (9) \| Respond to of 70976

>>I hope this gives you a look from my perspective - right now, it feels like the entire chip-and-related industry is pushing on a supply string when the change really needs to come on the demand end.<< I'm with you, Mitch. Much as I hate to admit it, Bill Gates was right. He's been able to get away with software bloat because transistors have gotten cheap faster than his programs have gotten fat. What we're seeing now is only the next step in a long-term trend. So... who benefits from cheap transistors? It isn't Intel--their business model assumes that processing power is rare enough for people to pay lots of money to get it. It isn't AMAT--if there are too many transistors on the market already, there isn't much appeal in buying expensive equipment to make more of them. It isn't even Microsoft--it's pretty clear that they've run out of truly new applications to use all that processing power. So who is it? As a technology investor, I'm much more interested in that question than in trying to call the equipment cycle. Anyone got any ideas? (I asked this question before and got surprisingly little response. That's a worrisome development in itself.) Katherine