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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (13793)	3/14/1998 10:34:00 PM
From: drmorgan	Respond to of 22053

Routers, Switches And Hubs . . . Oh, My!: I had pretty much dismissed all the fuss over El Ni¤o as so much mindless chitchat about atmospheric conditions taken to a nauseating and new extreme. That was until I experienced the devastation of the tropical tempest firsthand during a recent West Coast trip to visit Intel Corp. Attacking swiftly - and apparently beyond my notice - a tremendous wind lifted me and a 10,000-square-foot conference hall, depositing us in some sort of parallel universe in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. At first glance, everything seemed similar to the world I apparently had just left behind. The Intel logo, the same one emblazoned on tens of millions of personal computers, could be seen from one end of the hall to the other. Even Craig Barrett, Intel's president and chief operating officer, seemed his usually stately self. It wasn't until he started talking that I realized something was amiss - that we weren't in San Francisco anymore. His lips were moving, sure enough, but it wasn't talk of microprocessors, Pentiums and Moore's Law that was coming out of his mouth. Undeniably, it was words such as "Layer 3 routing," "switches" and "hubs" that echoed throughout the conference hall. While I'm quite aware that Intel is no stranger to the networking industry, supplying millions of adapter cards, hubs and switches to corporations annually, there was something different going on here. To start with, it was Barrett, the No. 2 man to Time magazine's Man of the Year, who was declaring the microprocessor giant's commitment to networking. In addition, Barrett was spouting the networking gospel in a tongue that was completely counter to the language favored by the heads of state at 3Com Corp. , Bay Networks Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and other traditional equipment makers. Not once did he utter the phrase "end-to-end solution." What convinced me that Intel is sincere about moving full-force into the networking arena and that I, after all, had not been blown into another dimension, is the manner in which Intel plans to attack the market. Understanding that taking on established players toe-to-toe is a no-win scenario - even for a company of Intel's size - it will instead pick its spots by staking claims in areas that still offer opportunities for new players, such as the small-business market. Most important, though, Barrett confirmed that Intel's center of the universe will continue to be the personal computer. In his address to journalists and analysts who turned out for Intel's biggest press event in several years, in what turned out really to be the City by the Bay, Barrett spoke of a "balanced" computing environment in which the network is defined by the personal computers and servers that occupy the ends of the public and private networks. After all, a PC-centric approach to networking makes perfect sense for Intel. When you've already paved a path with gold bricks, it would be foolish to blaze a new trail. Intel can be reached at www.intel.com zdnet.com