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

To: Smilodon who wrote (103)	3/18/1998 5:24:00 PM
From: Mark Bracey	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 134

This is just speculation on my part, but... I just started reading this thread when I noticed the rise in Applied the other day. I reviewed some of the posts and I noticed that it was indicated that Japan accounts for 42% of Applied sales. Depending on the product mix that is being sold there, I see this as a potential problem. 1. If a large percentage of those sales are incircuit emulators and/or CodeTest, then there is a problem. With the Asia crisis I'm assuming the Japanese are going to be more conservative and look for cheaper solutions. 2. BDM/OTC. Silicon based debug solutions are becoming more prevalent and there is a lot of competition. These solutions are about 10% the cost of a full blown emulator. SDS mainly sold these types of solutions and I was able to sell and win against emulators on almost every occasion. 3. BDM/OTC has been hot in the US for the last 3 or 4 years. It has been my experience that Japan has been about 2 years behind the US when it comes to debugging tools. I know that WIND/INTS and SDS are trying to sell these kinds of solutions in Japan and now would be a good time to hit them from a fiscal standpoint. So to answer your question in percentages, and this is from the gut.... 15% chance that Japan will pick up. 70% chance things will stay the same. 15% chance of a decline. In regard to Windows CE or an RTOS, if MSFT were to announce support for the PowerPC 4XX, 5XX, 6XX, and 8XX as well as support for the Motorola 683XX family of processors (including ColdFire), including TCP/IP, TAPI, File System, Sockets, instruction set simulators, Compiler Suite running on Windows NT/95, Solaris, and HPUX, board support packages for the vast variety of boards that are out there and a deterministic kernel with a comparable footprint, then INTS and WIND share price would probably drop 35 to 50% immediately as these are the bread and butter processors for these companies. They would slowly ramp back up as people began to realize that the announcement wouldn't be enough. A lot of development going on today is work in progress, not new projects. So it wouldn't make sense to start over with a new OS. Too much of a learning curve. But over time, as companies started developing from scratch, I think MSFT would eventually own the market as I don't think INTS or WIND would be able to compete on price or quality. The embedded tools market is not known for quality products. Price per seat for software for the embedded market is on the order of 10K per seat. BTW, I agree with Shakespeare. The Applied IPO was done by and for the VC's. I'm sure there was a lot of creating accounting to get that IPO to fly. It wouldn't be the first time I saw this for successful and unsuccessful IPOs in the embedded industry. Death, where is thy sting?