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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (6426)	7/9/2003 12:27:30 PM
From: Kirk ©	Respond to of 25522

."I think you are underestimating the input of customers (you left them out!) High profit margins need a significant body of sole source products. You don't achieve this without being in bed with customers. " No, I was just saving time typing. We had 95% market share for our IrDA stuff when I left. BOTH companies go out and talk to customers to design products for them. I know because I did it for Agilent and helped define many products such as the IrDA products we owned the market with. I knew the customers so well that I was in HP R&D labs on the floor helping make our IrDA module work in the first HP laptops with them. HP even gave me a free IrDA laptop and laserjet printer as "thanks" for helping design the products in. (no easy task to get a sensitive analog tranceiver to work in noisy digital devices like phones, laptops and printers) It is a hard thing to quantify and I don't want to slam Agilent but I think Maxim does it better and it is because they are more tech/R&D oriented, even for the business managers for new products. Maxim does it with far less overhead (I think they will shoot anyone who does a power point presentation while A was famous for them) which could explain why they are more profitable. I think Agilent designs far Better engineered products but this is far more expensive in a world where folks throw out consumer goods rather than get them fixed. BTW, HPs products were so well engineered... I am still using the 5MP laser printer and the 600C color notebook still works but it hardly has enough memory to do anything useful and the screen is too small.