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Technology Stocks : Texas Instruments - Good buy now or should we wait? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (3660)	5/30/1998 1:02:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 6180

Jim -- I've heard the comparison many times but don't have a quote in front of me. Here's one of the best descriptions of where TI's head: ti.com A speech that certainly indicates the same explosive growth even without saying it. The sun's out and my daughter's cat is stretched out on the patio outside my door. Talk about languor --- Pat

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (3660)	5/30/1998 4:38:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 6180

More digital thoughts, this time from the latest Forbes: <<< Digital picks up the pace By Andrew J. Kessler WHEN A DIGITAL PRODUCT gets going, it quickly swallows the analog market that came before it. The best example is the audio CD, which by 1996 accounted for 68% of all the music sold. Digital is poised to conquer almost everywhere; here are a few examples. Time to turn? Digital products will soon find these tree areas ripe for the plucking. <Picture>Cameras. Although the number of photos taken rises 1% to 3% a year, camera sales remain flat, at around 55 million. It's a fully saturated analog market, ripe for takeover. Digital cameras can't yet bite off much of that pie, because at 30,000-odd pixels per picture they're still too grainy. But when they reach the million-pixel level, film will go the way of the vinyl LP. Camcorders. Around 6 million camcorders are sold every year, 80% of them analog. The transition to digital video began when the technology's price dipped below $2,000. In Japan, DV already is more than half the market. Television. This fall digital TV broadcasts will start in ten U.S. markets. Broadcasters love it because they can jam four digital channels into the bandwidth needed for one analog channel. But high-definition television, or HDTV, is still a long way off, and for a different reason than you may think. You can make out the lines composing a TV image only if you sit within seven or eight picture heights. To notice the higher resolution of HDTV, you must sit within three picture heights. You'd have to get an 80-inch diagonal screen or move that Barcalounger a whole lot closer. Video format. DVD, a new format for storing gigabytes of digital data, will start to grab market share in 1998, not only in video but also in computer storage. Care to bet that DVD disks will claim as high a percentage for video in 2006 as CDs now claim for audio? Telephony. There are 600 million phones in the world, which is why telecommunications is a trillion-dollar business. These analog lines aren't going away, but you can augment them with digital technology. For instance, most phones in Europe still are not touch-tone; they can use a digital-powered voice-recognition interface. ("Read me my mail.") Digital reliability remains a problem. The public voice network is engineered to go down for maybe four minutes every ten years, whereas parts of the Internet go down at least once a month. Looks like a problem for a standards committee. There's a lot of room for new business now that telco competition is allowed. Anyone can lease a pair of wires from a regional Bell for $22 per month and use them to offer 155 megabits per second for $45,000 per month. Microprocessors. These gizmos set the ultimate speed limit for everything digital, and they are getting cheaper all the time. Consider the surprisingly low-tech manufacturing process Intel is considering. Now it applies tungsten to a wafer and then trims off the excess with expensive plasma etchers from Applied Materials, Lam and others. Intel has found that it can do the same job by simply turning the wafers over and grinding away the excess. Microcontrollers. In the old days furnaces doled out heat in response to thermostats-metal strips that expanded in heat or contracted in cold to close or open a circuit. Not very precise. Today such jobs are done with greater finesse by special chips, called microcontrollers, from such vendors as Motorola, Hitachi and National Semiconductor. There are about 100 microcontrollers in every home (microwave oven, coffeemaker, thermostat) and 15 to 20 in every car. No wonder they outnumber Pentiums 100-to-1 (although a Pentium's price is 1,000 times higher). Document management. The oldest analog storage device of all is the written document, which our society throws off by the billions. The crash of TWA Flight 800 has already spawned tens of millions of pages in some 500 law firms and at least 5 insurance firms. One-tenth of all insurance cases go to litigation, which cost the insurance industry $15.6 billion in 1995, more than half of which was in legal and administrative expenses. This spells opportunity for Web-based document management systems. Miscellaneous factoid: California is either the source or the destination of 40% of Internet traffic. Eat your hearts out, East Coasters. >>>>