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Technology Stocks : Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (480)	5/20/2002 2:23:51 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4345

> Intel hopes they will prod PC buyers and IT managers to trade in what it calls "today's installed base," mostly desktops running at 500MHz or below; according to the chipmaker, a Pentium 4/2.53 system will give those users roughly five times the office application or MPEG-4 video editing performance and almost seven times the frame rate in popular 3D games < This is the kind of talk that keeps me scared away from this entire sector. It makes me wonder if the people in charge are even in touch with their key market: Point by point: > a Pentium 4/2.53 system will give those users roughly five times the office application [performance] < Hmmm, my PIII/500 runs perfectly fine with WINXP and Office XP. It'll calculate and sort a thousand-line spreadsheet in about a second, experiences no delays (other than network related) when running the client software for SAP and Oracle, has no problem with email, web or other common applications. Resident databases also no problem at all, mostly due to a fast disk, and it'll compile VB code pretty nicely too. Any "office application performance" beyond what I've got on my desk will be imperceptible to most users. Until a new group of hungrier applications come along, faster processors will be unnecessary for office application use. > or MPEG-4 video editing performance < Irrelevant to 99.9% of business users, and not many home users either. If they're hanging their hopes of massive upgrades for MPEG editing capability, they're way out there. > and almost seven times the frame rate in popular 3D games < Completely irrelevant to business users. Will matter to game enthusiasts though and probably prod some to upgrade. Realistically though, the game enthusiasts are regular upgraders in any case, and I suspect few of them are on those sub-500MHz boxes. I have no doubt that many machines are getting a bit old, and many of them are beginning to break. I expect we will have a somewhat muted replacement cycle as we begin replacing what breaks. But the decision on what to replace will be an economic one: That it's cheaper to replace than to continue repairing old dogs. I do not expect the kind of "mass upgrades" we saw in the 90s when new generations of software forced us into upgrading entire companies all at once just to keep everybody on the same software platform. As I said, I expect this development to generate a somewhat less cyclical business, and a lot less forward visibility. In the past you could just look at the Microsoft roadmap and know when you would need to upgrade hardware. No more, at least not until they come up with something a lot hungrier. Michael