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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (168357)	7/16/2002 7:08:13 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

> What about other corporations.....the industrials, insurance etc.? Why are they not placing orders......their business has been picking up for two-three months now? < I've discussed this a bit in the past, going on my experience in advising comapnies that buy technology, mostly mid-sized firms. The answer is simple? WHY SHOULD THEY? Most of these companies last upgraded their PC equipment in the 1999-2000 timeframe, based either on Y2K concerns, a desire to upgrade to newer NT-based platforms, or both. Since then, nothing has come across in the business desktop world to give them any reason to upgrade. WinXP will work fine on most desktops that ran NT4 or Win2K, although sometimes a memory increase is desirable. Ditto for the current office suite, enterprise apps, etc. The major performance bottlenecks I see are usually due to network issues and in some cases due to the need for upgraded servers. There are some exceptions, but they ARE exceptions. People upgrade their hardware in order to run new software. So long as the software they are using runs on the current hardware and the current hardware isn't failing, they won't spend the money, and right now the "new, must have, cycle-hungry business software" that will make everybody feel like they have to upgrade just isn't out there. The "hungriest" application a typical end-user will use is Excel, and most of them will not even use it to much of its capability. It runs fine on a 3-year old 500Mhz machine. So for now, the people who control the money are waiting. When I worked for Intel in the early 90s, management was always very clear on the fact that the "software spiral" was the prime reason for people to keep on buying new PCs. The software spiral, as is relevant to the business world, has flattened, at least temporarily. At some point I expect that it will pick up, but that point is not on the horizon yet and it's not clear that even the fastest current hardware will be sufficient by the time we do see it. So for now, with no compelling reason to upgrade, most businesses are just waiting, replacing machines that are no longer economical to repair, and doing little else. An increase in employment would help, as it might mean businesses adding newer machines to support new employees. I suspect that fact will start a bit of a growth trend long before the software spiral catches up with us. mg