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To: Jim Patterson who wrote (25736)	12/19/1997 9:25:00 AM
From: Boplicity	Respond to of 176387

Good news at last. Larry's an egomaniac so is scotty at sunw. Oracle's NCI trims workforce By Michael Kanellos December 18, 1997, 6:40 p.m. PT Network Computer Incorporated (NCI) trimmed about 15 percent of its workforce today as the company struggles to make it in the small-computing world. About 30 of NCI's 200 employees have been dropped from the company's roster, an NCI spokesman said. These employees primarily worked in the direct corporate sales division of NCI and mostly worked in Europe. They will reassigned to positions at parent company Oracle. No developers were affected by the restructuring, said the spokesperson. In July, when its staff included about 130 employees, NCI eliminated around 21 employees and reassigned 20 others after its acquisition of Navio. Although the network computer concept has drawn vast amounts of attention from press and analysts, the concept has had little success in the commercial world. Only a few companies, including RCA and Funai, a small Japanese company, have agreed to make boxes based on NC reference designs and technology, pointed out Greg Blatnik, an analyst at Zona Research. So far, RCA has only started to release its boxes commercially. Funai's products, on the other hand, have only existed as demonstration units in North America. The staff changes, Blatnik said, "reflect a real uphill battle to get industry acceptance of their particular technology...Actual deals are fairly sparse." NCI's own business model also may be contributing to hard times. NCI itself does not make hardware. Instead, the company earns revenue off of non-recurring engineering charges, that is fees for reference designs and development software paid by manufacturers to NCI, and royalties on boxes that have been sold. Few companies have licensed the designs, making the engineering fees low, Blatnik said, and few boxes have been sold. Zona has issued reports predicting limited acceptance of the NC, especially in the corporate world. While NCI has emphasized that the affected employees are in sales, a source countered by pointing out that sales representatives are held in fairly high esteem at Oracle. The layoffs further reflect a drift toward consumer markets that the NC has been taking. The NC was originally positioned principally as a replacement for hard-to-maintain corporate desktop PCs and terminal computers, but increasingly the Oracle subsidiary has been refocusing on the home market since there have been relatively few customers for its corporate software. RCA's NC, for example, is sold in consumer electronics stores as a substitute for WebTV, retail sources have said. Microsoft and Intel have also diminished the impact of the NC concept by responding with a number of low-cost, network-centric business computing initiatives of their own. from cnet.com Greg

To: Jim Patterson who wrote (25736)	12/19/1997 11:20:00 AM
From: hpeace	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

jim, what makes your analysis incorrect is that the top 4 pc mfg'ers are gettting more market share than the others. the pc growth for 1998 is going to be 14-15%. now you say, "we all know that asia growth is 6-12%... korean and japan are the countries effected. australia is in the numbers for the 6-12%.. they aren't tanking. so is india and china, and they are going... I will find all the research and then from the research you'll have facts to use. as far as ASP's....I was in this game from the beginning....when we use to sell high end pcs for 8k and in japan they paid 30k for a pc. so, why aren't compaq and dell broke selling pcs for 1500 now. Please research gross margins. dell is rising although slower than cpq's. cpq's gross margins are 27.4 and dell sare 22.5 and those numbers have been going up... why is that. well, a pc is 92-94% purchase parts. if currency rates weaken against the $ then you buy parts for 50% cheaper or 40% cheaper. Since a pc is almost all purchase parts... you margins are higher and your profit is more. Not trying to pick on you....but just how long have you been analizing cost in pc industry... I've done it from the inside of the companies since 1983 and even wrote the computer systems to do it for finance and accounting at cpq. I see dell's growth at a minimum of 35-40% and cpq's at maybe 40%.. these numbers are on the low end.... dell's could be higher if they get lower cost. question what is the growth of cpq and dell and hp right now with 3q results and what does the research say about october ,novemeber, december???? Lastly, their is no asp problem. start from 1982 and track asp and you see that it is shrinking less and less every qtr on a $ basis. please print out all these and study them and then figure out what the real issue is... print them out and study. exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com exchange2000.com