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

To: Dan3 who wrote (171283)	9/27/2002 1:46:03 AM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

> A very large percentage of computer purchases are for businesses and cannot be deferred. < Businesses seem to be deferring them just fine, and have been for the past two years. If you're not adding people, and not building any new applications, then you can go for quite a while with what you've got. And most businesses are doing just that. In fact, most businesses have more PCs than they have people to use them these days. Or didn't you notice the waves of layoffs all around the country, and rising unemployment. The only PC purchases I'm seeing in businesses these days are replacements of units that are not economic to repair any longer. Raise the price of the replacement unit, and businesses will figure out to defer even longer. It's a bit different at the server level, where you can sometimes gain pretty big efficiencies by replacing multiple old units with single new ones, or where strategic IT initiatives may require more power than you've got. Even there, the market is pretty muted. The only people who seem unable to defer purchases are die-hard gamers who've got to have the latest and greatest. In a competition-free world might Intel double their margins? I suppose they might. But the fact is that in many server/workstation markets they have no real competition at the moment and we're still far away from that $1000 processor some people think would come back. Also, keep in mind that Microsoft doesn't make anything close to $250 per PC in a typical corporate installation with large licensing deals rather than one-at-a-time purchases. mg