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

To: Jack T. Pearson who wrote (20172)	3/6/1998 11:41:00 PM
From: Roads End	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Jack...You are right, a machine that can do something quicker will be more productive up to a point. Let's take another industry to illustrate the point I was making. If you had a delivery truck delivering the over stuffed inventory that was capable of 250 miles an hour how much faster could you deliver all those computers with an obsolete truck capable of 60 miles an hour?

To: Jack T. Pearson who wrote (20172)	3/7/1998 2:03:00 AM
From: Doug Fowler	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 97611

Jack: Your explanation seems reasonable but where is the proof that a PC that is 20 to 30 percent faster makes employees 3 percent more productive ? For $1000 or less, you can buy a Pentium 200 or 233 with 32M RAM, a 2G hard drive, a fast CD-ROM and 56K modem. Add $50 for a network card. Such a machine is entirely adequate and functional for 80 to 90 percent of the computing population. (I might add another 32M of memory for $80.) I just don't see why most people would need to spend $1000 more for a PC that is faster, especially when I see no proof of the benefits. $1000 more won't allow me to type faster. It will hardly load or save my documents faster. I won't be able to surf the Internet faster. Now, if the machine would make Windows more reliable (meaning it crashes far less often), I would pay more. Unfortunately, I have not found the more expensive PCs to be any more stable than the cheap ones. The computing world is coming to the conclusion that cheap PCs are quite adequate. People have learned in the past few years that they need only wait a few months, and they can buy that "dream machine" for half of what it cost when it was first introduced. The trend toward sub-$1000 PCs has just begun, in my opinion. Within a year, more than 50 percent of all new PCs purchased will belong to this class. Within two years, 75 percent will be under $1000. Compaq will sell gazillions of these PCs. The big question is whether they will make money doing so. On another topic, Compaq has (so far) missed the boat on laptops. Where are the 13.3 and 14.1 inch displays? I think they have one or two models priced near $5000. Dell has a very good 13.3" TFT display with 32M RAM running at 233 MHz for $2499. Dell and Gateway have been selling the larger screen varieties for months. What is Compaq doing to combat this?