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

To: Bong Lewis who wrote (2534)	6/4/1998 8:18:00 PM
From: dougjn	Respond to of 7342

You asked someone else, not me, but I think Intel is a poor choice for some time. Here is much of the text of a private message I sent in response to a private query from someone: ------snip------- I worry that Intel may continue to grow not even as fast as the PC industry for another year or more due to margin pressures entering from the top line. I.e., declining average selling prices. The trouble of course is relatively weak market demand for their fastest processors, compared with past experience. The truth is that for most applications the fastest makes little difference as compared to the second or third. (E.g., demand for 350mhz PII versus 266mmx is not very strong and is quite price sensitive.) This is not in my judgment obviously going to change. It may change in the future for the desktop business and home mainstream, but it may not. A sea change has occurred. Previously, the PC was never fast enough to comfortably accommodate leading software that made it easy and attractive to use for mainstream, office tasks. (One can argue that that was the fault of bloated software; whatever, it was the reality.) Now the PC is fast enough, except for Internet connectivity. The answer there is not in the processor, but in bandwidth. And perhaps other solutions as well, but not primarily the processor. At least for some time to come. (Speech recognition could become another processor speed hungry app, but its not yet ready for prime time, and won't be next year either.) All this is of course now well recognized. (Perhaps it was less so more than a year ago, when I cleared out of Intel.) But the point I'm making is that it is an inflection point, a sea change in Intel. Which of course many cannot really appreciate. It is I think a great mistake to extrapolate past performance and dominance beyond inflection points. You have to look and re-evaluate. Merced could become another, positive inflection point for Intel. However, success there is not assured. After all, the 64bit performance advantages for Merced will depend on writing a whole lot of new software for it. There seems to be a lot of support and sense of inevitability about the chip in the industry, so maybe it is relatively certain that that will happen, but when it happens is less certain. Until there are killer server/workstation apps that run a lot faster on Merced than on the existing RISC chip solutions, mass adoption will probably not occur. Despite the great advantages of the advertised backwards compatibility (at much more pedestrian PII level speeds) with Windows NT/95/98 software. Personally I'm interested primarily in telecom, wireless telecom, data bandwidth and enterprise software as the highest growth/fewest blowups areas of technology. Pharma too, but there I can hardly see much room for multiple expansion. ------snip------ Doug