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To: lucky_limey who wrote (15415)	7/14/1998 6:00:00 PM
From: HerbVic	Respond to of 213182

Well, I know a little of this stuff. National Instruments is a company out of Austin, Texas that does data acquisition and control software and I/O boards for microcomputers. As I understand it, they started with a program called LabView originally for the Macintosh, but now have a version for Windows as well. The software is pretty hot in engineering and scientific circles. It competes almost head to head with an application called WindowWare, which (to my knowledge) is not a multi-platform application. >>G3 Unix Workstation, a special software >>bundle aimed directly at helping research scientists become more >>productive. This new system can run three operating systems >>concurrently, and offers unparalleled management of your technical >>workflow. Sounds like a Macintosh with Rhapsody, Unix and Mac OS (??). To excite this crowd with this configuration, there has to be a 6 slot hardware platform in the offering. HerbVic

To: lucky_limey who wrote (15415)	7/15/1998 1:54:00 PM
From: Olof C Hellman	Respond to of 213182

About the G3 Unix boxes: it's a good bundle for people who can't get a Mac past their purchasing department, but who can justify a Unix workstation, especially when the competition is double the price. The competition (Sun, HWP, IBM) starts at $5000 or so. The costs are higher because more of the parts are custom, the processors are manufactured in smaller volume, and historically speed has come from fast busses (which drive up the cost of all the parts on the board) and cutting-edge processors. The PPC G3 can compete only because of its "memory-centric" design, in which a lot of effort went into making the backside cache efficient. National Instruments (NATI - mentioned in the same PR) is one of the other companies I'm invested in. They seem to have a good combination of management and technology, and produce pretty good Mac and Windows products. I'm sure the three OSes mentioned in the blurb are MacOS, Tenon's UNIX-on-Mac (MachTen?) and Connectix's VirtualPC. Meanwhile, since everyone seems to be guessing today, I'll go for 0.44 and hope to be proven too conservative. About the question of why there would be an upside after earnings... start doing your calculation for Q4 and think about what might be said in the conference call. Even if Eric is wrong about margins for Q3 (I think you are optimistic, Eric), we ought to see those margins for Q4 as G3 powerbook supply/sales take off, not to mention more iMac hype. Color screens are much cheaper than they used to be, even for bigger ones, and I don't see a corresponding reduction in PowerBook price. At MacHack, I got a look at some of the insides -- actually, it was the hack where Drew Thaler had constructed a PowerBook case out of legos and put the real hardware in it -- not a whole lot there to drive the price up, except the legos, of course, which seem to be pretty pricy these days.