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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: capt rocky 1 who wrote (81356)	3/5/2002 10:11:35 AM
From: Pat Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

What / Where / Who is that guy? Is that piece dated? Thanks

To: capt rocky 1 who wrote (81356)	3/5/2002 10:56:48 AM
From: cordob	Respond to of 93625

I will read it, but I am afraid it may be full of "apespeak", which I do not understand so well. Cheers Cor

To: capt rocky 1 who wrote (81356)	3/5/2002 11:56:12 PM
From: SBHX	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

capt, I read the article and found a lot of factual errors. Needs a lot of work. The most obvious mistakes are too easy to rebut, however, I'd bring up the more interesting ones : Claim : The industry hates rambus because they envy the superior business model. Fact : The industry looked at rdram and by and large they passed on it for other more suitable technology. There was some resentment at INTC's attempt to strongarm all the players to fall in line, but by and large everyone ignored rmbs until they claimed to assert their ownership of certain IPs in sdram and ddr. That got everybody's attention, alright. When I make product A with the full expectation that it is safe to sell, for someone to show up and claim that they own a piece of it, the first reaction is to understand what the basis of this claim is. Most preferred to just stay out of their radar and leave the battle for others with deeper pockets with an axe to grind. But the author is almost right: hatred of Rambus (not envy) is universal within the semiconductor industry. Claim : Rambus has a superior business model Fact : Fundamentally, we clearly cannot mean that rambus has all the patents. A quick search in delphion.com reveals the following matches : Rambus : 210 Infineon : 421 Micron Technology : 5806 ibm : 43957 So what makes the rambus patents so superior to the other patents owned by the others? I would argue there is some novelty in each patent and that it is hard to judge the superiority of any patent portfolio. But is it a superior business model to just patent everything and not make anything? When I first looked at it, it looked incredible, this is what all the other companies are missing : everybody usually walks away from these things with cross-licenses --- why not just stop building stuff and live off your patents? If this was indeed a superior business model, I would expect that micron and ibm will stop their inferior business model, cease manufacturing and simply live off their patent portfolio. The fact that they have not is a good indication that this claim is questionable. Further study MIPS and ARM, two companies that license IP the honest way. If you need their IP, you license it, if not, you built something else. They did not try to make their 'IP' a public standard and then turn around to ambush the world with it, nor did they work at modifying patent filings while they were finding out what is being ratified in the standard. This isssue is at the core why this company is hated by the semiconductor industry as a whole, but analysts and moms and pops and academics don't understand this, and never will. Craig Barrett had the right analogy when he calls it collecting tolls. Lets explain this in simple terms : the industry was building what they thought was a freeway, then rmbs pops up and claims they own a series of patents on one of the additives used in the crankcase oil of the asphalt laying machine, hence they own the right to set up toll booths in it. Well, the industry is in the process of dismantling the toll booths and running these characters out of town. It is that simple. SbH