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Technology Stocks : S3 (A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Phil Fischer who wrote (7950)	11/17/1997 4:28:00 PM
From: Ski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14577

Phil, Agreed. If ATI comes out with a lousy main graphics chip, ATI is doubly screwed. Fortunately for me, this year, things are groovy. At Comdex yesterday, the ATI All-In-Wonder graphics board won PC Computings' MVP award for "Best Multimedia Graphic Card" AND the "Innovation of the Year" award beating out 225 products in 75 categories. That All-In-Wonder is a really cool product. You stock market junkies might like it as it has a feature to search the closed captioning text stream that accompanies TV channels. Then it saves the text and video when user supplied keywords are found. A neat feature for you information addicts. Ski

To: Phil Fischer who wrote (7950)	11/17/1997 5:05:00 PM
From: Bill Lin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14577

phil and ski, you guys are the only guys speaking about fundamentals and strategies on this web. As to business plans, i think it is already blindingly obvious. The graphics chip market is diversifying because of uncertainty in the implementation of 3D in PC graphics, and is missing the "killer app". So everyone is wooing their own implementation of games. S3 did this, nvidia does this, ATI does this... The idea is similar to Sony Playstation and N64 wars. no software, no need for hardware. This time, however, the razor/razorblade strategy is perversely reversed. no hardware/no software. Quake and Quake 2 really needs GL speed, which is different from other 3D implementations. If SGI wasn't such a suck company, they should be developing a graphics coalition to maintain a standard. As it is, Microsoft is dominating the standards (the S3 friend), and will push the next iteration of 3D api's. Also, Ziff-Davis is pushing the 3D direction with their benchmarks. board vendors much kow tow to these benchmarks, since that is how most people buy their game boards. it also helps create marketing "hype". The strategy is then simple. Attach your company to the Microsoft implementation of 3D. understand the ZD benchmarks, and create 3 design teams to handle the mainstream graphics design. 1 team to support the current design. 1 team to work out the bugs of the next design (hopefully already in silicon), and 1 team to design the 3rd generation. When the 2nd gen design is released in samples, the 1st team must begin working on the 4th gen. or else some people need to be hired to work on it. You can bet that there is a theory team already working of Post Merced chips at Intel. When the api standards are set, you will see a flood of low cost "mid range" product (200 3D winmark '98) then a consolidation of the graphics industry. today, i think the fat and happy (ati, matrox) think they can go ahead without too much help. but looking back in the late 1980's at intel/nsm/amd/mot/sunw/sgi/mips cpu wars, there WILL be 1-2 dominant graphics chip companies with a wealth of designing talent. right now, TXN seems the best positioned to step in a dominate the fragmented graphics market. But Rockwell probably has the will. (these guys have $ Billion cash flows) Otherwise it will be a cat fight between the usual suspects. i find it very helpful emotionally to create a basket of historical stocks, and watching the portfolio go up and down, and reacting the the various drops in prices. 1987 was a sucky year for techs, and serves as a strong lesson for both strategy and investing. BL