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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Return to Sender who wrote (51609)	3/30/2011 11:55:19 PM
From: robert b furman	1 Recommendation Respond to of 95525

Hi RtS, Ya know I always knew there was something about you that I liked! Great story and analogy. LOL Bob

To: Return to Sender who wrote (51609)	4/3/2011 3:33:18 PM
From: Sun Tzu	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95525

This is not a good analogy. For a long time the price of the PC you wanted to have was ~ $4k - $5k. Then for an almost equal time span you had a 50% in the price of the PC you wanted to have. And it happened again, bringing the price of the desirable PC ~$1000. These days you can probably get away with less than $500 for the PC that you want. In other words, even if you sell 10x as many PC's as you did 25 years ago, you still have had 0% growth in 25 years. The PC market is dead. The server market is not that different either. You can still make money in a dead or dying market, just as people make money with cigarette makers. But you shouldn't mistake such markets with growth opportunities. But all is not lost. A not fully appreciated revolution is happening in mobile computing. It is wrong to think of mobile computing as just smaller laptop or tablets or even as more capable cell phones. Such analogies miss the boat all together. A few weeks ago I read about a hw add on to iphone that cost the university researchers only $200 to make. It can examine your cell samples and diagnose cancer on the fly. Think about how disruptive this and similar technologies are going to be to the medical labs. Nearly 40% of patients are misdiagnosed and it has been shown that a Google search (assuming of course that you know how to describe the symptoms) does better diagnosis than 3 out of 4 doctors. Now imagine what this means when you can have IBM's Watson in your pocket within 10 years...and Watson was not allowed to connect to the internet. Of more immediate use are applications like 4-Squares and only slightly further out the marriage of object and people recognition with mobile computing. Already there are people who make a living by scanning isbn of used books and looking up the average price and marketability of the book on Amazon. Like I said, mobile computing is not neither a smaller laptop/tablet, nor a fancier phone; it is a highly disruptive technology that will fundamentally change how the society functions. ST