To: Greg Jung who wrote (26884 ) 5/31/1998 10:47:00 PM From: gao seng Read Replies (2) | Respond to
I orignally thought Compaq was going to be punished by Intel when they announced that Compaq would sell AMD cpus in their PCs several months ago, and was delighted to see my prediction come true by seeing their stock price take a beating. However, the move seems brilliant in light of recent news from Intel regarding Merced. Compaq's current inventory problems revolve around obsolete pentiums, not AMD or Cyrix machines. So by removing themselves from the umbilical cord of Intel, they are also free of Intel's problems, which now seem to be huge. Trust me on this, Microsoft will not delay NT enterprise assimiliation because of this. But there option is Compaq via the Alpha chip to compete with Ultra Sparc. Alpha is already 64 bit and scales quite nicely, whereas the Merced is still a pipedream of Intel, a company that has a reputation for quality manufacturing, but flawed processor designs (i.e. floating point errors). The future is no longer WinTel but WinPaq, and to complete the picture, I look for Compaq to acquire Fore Systems because it is a well known fact that Microsft has bet the farm on a internet based on a minimum of 2MB per second bandwidth through ATM. This is documented in their Netshow documentation, and supported by the fact that Microsoft is being transformed into an entirely Fore ATM network. I think Compaq sells crappy PCs to the home user, but are far superior in the business end. This is their problem, and the solution is not Radio Shack, but Wal-Mart who has virtually no PC sales at their stores. They got badly burned by 486's becomin worthless overnight. The first, either Dell or Compaq or whoever, to get the Wal Mart connection will win the home user market. I believe this will be Dell, the logistics of each match so well. But Compaq doesn't need this market, and should concentrate on the business market selling NT Alpha machines. Disaccociation from Intel is one thing, but selling junk AMD's can hurt your reputation in the long run.
