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To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (49818)	7/6/1998 12:16:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 176387

chuz - Is it fair to say that the vast bulk of Compaq's R&D spending is for proprietary components See my response to Jim's post (which was excellent, I wonder who Doug is...) The answer is no, it would not be correct to characterize CPQ's current R&D in that way. R&D for mainstream products is almost exclusively devoted to standards-based development, usually in collaboration with MSFT and / or Intel. This was the result of a decision made in 1995 to move all of the product lines to industry standard components within 18 months. There were still a few long term projects which had proprietary products as their goal, which are only now coming to market, and there were a few that they picked up with Tandem. Tandem also has the Himalaya business which is of course very proprietary. DEC has the Alpha and OpenVMS lines, which are also proprietary. I would expect CPQ to move quickly to get MSFT aligned around a plan to get rid of as much of that proprietary technology as possible. They will also need to establish Alpha as a mainstream processor or give it up. CPQ is also Intel's largest customer, but their relationship with Intel is not nearly as good as Dell's. CPQ has moved almost completely away from the 'sole source' model in desktops. The desktops introduced in 1997 use industry standard memory, disk drives, and most other components. Server products use standard memory but disk drives and some other components, while standard in form and interconnect, are CPQ part numbers. For example an IBM disk drive sold to CPQ for server use has additional firmware for pre-failure analysis and performance enhancements when used with CPQ controllers. The same model disk drive purchased from IBM will plug in and work fine, but the pre-failure code will not run since the drive will not have the firmware to respond to requests from the controller. If you don't care about those features, you can go to your local computer store and buy pretty much anything and plug it into a CPQ server, and it will work. I bought an adaptec controller and a couple of western digital SCSI drives for a CPQ server not long ago and did just that. The server recognized the controller and drives and they installed and ran without problem. There was a single note in the system installation log for each device indicating that certain prefailure data would not be collected for those devices.

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (49818)	7/6/1998 1:25:00 AM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

CTC, Doug wrote the post. I think that Dog has come around with the correct spin on the facts when he says that CPQ R&D is now standards based. Most of their R&D is actually development. This is an ongoing need and is going to have to be standards based. As such it is necessary that that this be done in concert with MSFT and INTC if not CSCO and or COMS. The actual constitution of CPQ research is more of a mystery. I think Dog pointed out that standardization of components is now a priority. It looks like CPQ firmware and BIOS may be among the last proprietary software components in their PC's. The notion of licensing SMP server technology is interesting. I do not know if CPQ recovers its R&D costs via CPQ has proprietary interests in the ALPHA and the TANDEM computers which are not PC's per se. They are also not mainstream products. Regards, Jim Kelley