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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (3381)	7/7/1998 8:58:00 PM
From: mac	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10309

The conference call was to "announce" the acquisition of Zinc as well as to update us on I2O. Zinc is being positioned by everyone in the press as the embedded GUI answer to MSFT CE. According to the news conference you can get a full GUI with a relatively small footprint of ~750k bytes. This you can have a medium size app. in the 1-2MB range, as opposed to CE which really can't get done under ~4M. In fact, as far as I know you can emulate a WinCE user interface if thats what you really want to do.. i.e., have a Windows START button. However, what Ron A was trying to emphasize is that you can basically have your cake and eat it.. i.e., you can emulate a WinCE interface (he never mentioned CE by name) or you can "differentiate" yourself by using Zinc to easily make you own UI. Ron A. is very fond of the term "differentiate" as that seems to be his psychological push against CE for his customers. Embedded system builders want to differentiate their product from others.. not just follow in the MSFT/Start button path, i.e., all embedded UIs looking like Windows 95. Or so we hope. Interesting move was their allowing Zinc to remain an independent entity. There will be a Zinc for pSOS and a Zinc for VxWorks etc. I'm sure their slant is that the more OSs that use Zinc UI, the less influence MSFT will have in the area. I believe that they want to increase the general industry competition against MSFT, and not just have Zinc for themselves...as alternative approach. Ron A. said that I2O was 6-9 months late in ramping up, but that with the release of the MSFT part of the I2O driver set (supposedly today) he believed (as well as Intel) that the serious ramp up is about to begin. He didn't mention numbers. In my own humble opinion, I feel more comfortable with Wind stock now than I've felt in 6 months. The fact that DMG's Mike Kwatinetz upgraded the stock to BUY last week was actually quite amazing. Now I'm sure some people may say that he was just helping Wind out after the UBS securities downgrade, but I believe that he also is one of the most respected analysts on MSFT. He understands WIND and he understands MSFT...i.e., Wind's supposed "killer competition", and for the first time since DMG did that secondary with WIND, he has gone to a full BUY. That's rather impressive. Also, I've read previous research reports from DMG, H&Q, Wessels and UBS and the latter was by far the least informative and authoritative. Also, I cannot for the life of me see Wind making less than $1.00 in this fiscal year with I2O finally ramping up. That's a PE of approx. 35 which is a steal for this company at its present growth rate. No doubt FAS123 is important, but there's a whole forest of young growing trees out there being sheilded by some ugly FAS123 trees. Maybe we should look past these trees to see the young forest thrive :) regards mac