To: Doug who wrote (81615 ) 8/30/2001 12:32:18 PM From: Crystal ball Read Replies (1) | Respond to Agree: EFFICIENCY or belt tightening started by the 2nd Greenspan induced earnings recession will force coorporate EFFICIENCY, that means any and ALL purchasing on the rebound, the economic recovery, will be for those products and services that are more efficient and more productive at LOWER COSTS than previous services and products. My friends, we may be seing the end of high end expensive IRON, that is SERVERS. Likewise the mini-mainframes. Even the Desktop and Laptop, that is why I am into PDA stocks like PALM and HANDspring. We are likewise going to see the same in telcom, as companies go to wireless LAN and WAN, possible now due to deregulation by the FCC of the spectrum to give ethernet speeds IN HOUSE WIRELESS for messaging, email, telephony etc.. The Techs are and I never implied they were immune from the business cycle, but we have to take a close look at what a tech business cycle is. This means going beyone the typical boom and bust of Chips and Boxes (Chip equipment maker lithographics etc, Semi-conductors, jelly bean/component parts, computer assemblers etc). We have SPECIALIZATION today beyond the past practice of hiring all in house tech and computer data engineers, today everything is outsourced for lower labor costs, but also for higher technological innovation, that is the sucess of ORACLE for databases and the like, also SEBL for the emerging CRM customer or client relationship management software, and likewise STORAGE, your EMC and NTAP (which I own). I bought into STORAGE because software has a longer shelf life than storage services and hardware capacity. Even MSFT knows that XP will be the last sucess for quite some time, even though for example, its competitors, NOVL befell a fate requiring 1100 layoffs some years back, and AAPL almost went bankrupt before Gates bailed them out, and brought back Jobs, now CORL botched somehow the BORL merger (All former AAPL or MSFT people oddly, and has now just with almost 50% investment from MSFT Corel now states oddly they will sell off their 15% revenue maker on developed LINUX and JAVA applications to Xandros(spelling ?)----anyway, my point there is FREE LINUX. MSFT has problems on future profitability. ORCL will rebound whereas I think we are seeing the demise of higher and hogher performance from companies like IBM, SUNW and MSFT. DELL has more flexibility and adaptability. The question is COST EFFICIENCY again. Why pay if you can get the milk for free. (excuse the crude analogy). So yes, there will be mergers, not because of valuations as you indicate, but for pure survival, to eliminate COST EFFICIENT emerging competition or to merge with them to obtain those COST EFFICIENCIES.
