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

To: J R KARY who wrote (3500)	7/17/1998 4:04:00 PM
From: George W Daly, Jr.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8218

Disclaimer: I work for IBM but I do not speak for the company in any way and all views and opinions are my own. Well I found the official press release at ibm.com There it agrees with you Jim that IBM can compete with Motorola for Apples desktop. But if you read down a little farther it tends to break down where the two companies will concentrate their efforts. "Motorola will continue its support for the computer market through enhancements and extensions of its existing PowerPC microprocessor products while expanding the product offerings targeted at networking, switching and transmission infrastructure. Other markets that will also benefit from the transition of the Somerset design center are consumer, imaging and transportation. IBM, in turn, will continue its aggressive focus on developing high-end PowerPC microprocessors for its server products. IBM will also direct additional energies toward developing its rapidly growing PowerPC microprocessor embedded controller business, which is a key element fueling its high-growth custom logic business. " From those two its pretty clear who intends on going after the Apple business. But specifically you're correct, we could. And of course we will continue to manufacture G3 processors for them but who knows about future processors. My guess would certainly be if Motorola designs them they would want to manufacture them as well and get the volumes but in this crazy world today where IBM makes hard drives for Western Digital etc who knows. Absolutely anything can happen. But that press release makes it clear where IBMs first priorities for PowerPC are, servers and embedded controllers. The IBMers that were doing Apple processor designs are now either Motorolans or free agents for the most part. FYI, a minor nit but IBM manufactures its chips in Burlington,Vt and EastFishkill,NY. Rochester,MN is where AS400 and RS6000 boxes are manufactured, the chips come from other places. Rochester, as well as Austin, and just about every other site in IBM do DESIGN chips though. Hope this helps, I usually know more than what I post but because almost all of it is unannounced I have to be very careful not to let any of it out on the public forums. A tough line to walk so I usually just choose not to say anything. GW