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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hpeace who wrote (8250)	10/30/1997 8:56:00 PM
From: jeffjl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

Speculation: Maybe CPQ would buy SGI? from today's "I, Cringley" column: (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/) "By the time it was clear that the 3-D graphics business was fading, the World Wide Web was supposed to take over. And true to SGI's glorious history, the company developed some of the best Web development tools around. But Web development tools, like 3-D animation tools, don't have to be run strictly on SGI boxes. There are many more Web servers than Web development systems, and the best price-performance Web servers are Intel-based, a fact that will soon come home not just for SGI, but also for Sun and Digital. So what's to come of SGI? Well the boss, Ed McCracken, will soon be history. And the company itself will follow one of two courses. First, they have to get their profit margins up by taking cost out of the hardware. This means embracing the demon by building (or buying) Intel boxes running Windows NT. The days of SGI's custom hardware, and even its very powerful line of MIPs processors, are fading. The second course, which isn't at all in conflict with the first, is that the company will be sold. Certainly the MIPs processor business has to go, and maybe the rest of the company with it. MIPs chips certainly aren't going to go away, since there is one inside every Sony PlayStation. And there are tons of MIPs R-10000 chips at the heart of every nonstop mainframe from Tandem Computer, too. Tandem is now owned by Compaq. Tandem needs MIPs processors, which means Compaq needs MIPs processors. Compaq would like to dominate the 3-D graphics market and would also like some advantage in Web development tools. Compaq can also use all the good engineers it can find. Is a pattern beginning to emerge here? Look for Compaq to take a strong run at SGI. " Sounds plausible to me...