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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (47935)	6/18/1998 1:50:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Ken, Zeem - I hate to see otherwise intelligent people getting hung up on semantics but the definition of what is or is not a workstation is not nearly as hard to figure as you guys seem to think. It seems these 'standards' last about 10 minutes There are many examples of key standards that have lasted a lot longer than 10 minutes. PCI, SCSI, VGA/SVGA, Socket 7 to name a few. The industry as we know it would not exist without these standards. Microsoft maintains a list of hardware which meets minimum standards for NT, and a separate one for Win9X products. There is a third in the works for Servers which takes effect later this summer. These are known as HCLs or Hardware Compatibility Lists. Vendors must submit every new hardware configuration to Microsoft and pay for the testing to get on the HCL. If you are not on the HCL you can not sell your hardware to state agencies in 47 of the 50 states. I believe that all of the fortune 500 require that vendors be on the HCL for purchase consideration. These are make or break standards for companies like Dell that depend on commercial business. Microsoft and Intel are concerned that the attempts by workstation 'wannabees' like GTW, Packard-Bell and others to take a standard desktop and call it a workstation will create confusion in the marketplace and slow the development of true workstations in the Wintel architecture. They are currently working on a 'professional workstation design standard'. Products that meet this minimum bar will be featured on a Microsoft 'professional workstation' hardware compatibility list, and Intel will probably develop a logo program similar to 'Intel Inside' awarded to workstation-capable products. At that point the corporate and government purchases of products not on the workstation HCL will pretty much disappear. Most importantly, companies that design software for the workstation market can demand that users purchase from the HCL if they want software support. The requirements for certification in these programs have nothing to do with where the system is in a network, whether software os local or host based, or any of the other fanciful ideas presented here. The programs depend on the features Meathead and I have discussed - advanced disk subsystems (SCSI, Fibre-channel, or 1394 'firewire'), memory interface (MSFT will support both Intel's standard as well as the RCC chipset which can nearly double memory bandwidth, Intel will have a slightly different bar related to limiting supported memory to fast designs, eventually probably RAMBUS), AGP graphics as a minimum with constraints on minimum 3D performance, and several more arcane I/O requirements related to multiple network adapter performance, workstation farms and idle cycle harvesting which are important in the traditional Unix workstation market. There are minor differences in the workstation products of Dell, HP, IBM and CPQ but they all meet this compatibility requirement. There are few other Wintel vendors who can make that claim. I hope this will clarify the business implications, and therefore the potential value to Dell for their investment in true workstation technology. This really is an important distinction and you are confusing workstations with power desktops in your discussion.