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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kathleen capps who wrote (30050)	7/20/1998 11:58:00 PM
From: Earlie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

MB: (30035): You beat me to the punch on IBM. Good comments. We've been digging into this pile of accounting dung for many weeks but can't write up a "hell-dammer".....yet. Louis is good. In "the old days", he would have been burned at the cross by the analysts for the multi-quarter decline in "quality of revenues" (high margin business declining, replaced by lower margin service business), but current crop of analysts don't know how to dig, so the Emperor still reigns. With the service business, old Lou can book the service revenues to suit his needs. I find the precision of the quarter-after-quarter, "exactly-what-I-needed-to-replace-my-lost-hardware-sales-revenues" to be a remarkable coincidence. (g) Apple's shelf space evaporation continues. Good machines, but saleable only to the cognoscenti. A lost cause. The restructuring benefits will peter out this fall. Cost cutting extends a drawn-out death. Too soon to short yet, but they won't make it through the coming shoot-out at the OK Corral. The PC market place is just too nasty for weak sister survival. We reckon the crunch follows a soggy Christmas sales period. Open question to CPQ's management team,.......WHAT's to write down at DEC? The company has been selling off divisions for many quarters (building up the cash horde), employment has fallen from 112,000 to 45,000 due to immediate past tense writedowns and the company forced their last remaining white elephant down Intel's throat, last year (the old patent suit routine, honed to a fine edge). The original estimate of a $1.5 billion writedown was bad enough, but $5.0 billion? This is outrageous. Either Herr Leader is uttering fibs through his bicuspids, or he did the century's dumbest deal or he planned the whole thing as a cover-up for "the-great-channel-stuff-that- never-was". Shall we bet on which? If CPQ gets away with this one, "restructuring" will become an accounting methodology. (as if it hasn't already). What is a "virtual company" worth these days? Best, Earlie