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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Dawson who wrote (17510)	7/30/1998 1:08:00 AM
From: janski	Respond to of 29386

Excuses, excuses, excuses. They always have one. Perfectly sensible and reasonable excuses. No wonder they don't have time to actually accomplish anything meaningful.

To: George Dawson who wrote (17510)	7/30/1998 2:32:00 PM
From: Technocrat	Respond to of 29386

Hi George. You may be right about the difficulty in proving one brand is better than the other. I would settle for any tangible proof that Ancor is not considerably inferior to the competition. All of us bet on the probabilities that Ancor would have to be a source for an occasional OEM if their switch was in the same ballpark. We are batting zero and I have not heard why. I think we are in agreement in regards to scale, but I still do not see why Ancor does not jump at chances to demo with the big boys for free. Our company just wrote off millions of dollars of inventory. What have we got to show for it? I agree with group that Ancor's priorities are to 1) make money and 2) prove they are ready with a top notch switch for the FC wave. Never put #1 ahead of #2. Right now what I am hearing is neither alternative is getting enough attention. That is why Ancor has an investor confidence problem reflected in the stock price. People will hold if there is light at the end of the tunnel. This is not a momentum stock. We had plenty of longs. I have been tangentially involved in some large-scale experiments usually done where there would be good exposure with government officials and industry leaders. For example, SIGGRAPH or SuperComputing 9x, etc. Usually, the hitch is capital equipment so doing something for a few days or a week means you pull a few million dollars of stock off the line to be reshipped later. Seagate, IBM, SGI, and others do this all the time. A significant amount of sales are written up right at the showing. I agree that building a few terabytes of storage is a lot of money on the conference floor plus it can hold up shipment to paying customers. This is not Ancor's problem right now as much as I wished it was. On top of that, these conference players have money. Look at the Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the Army's digitization program, etc., etc. The state of Minnesota pours money of its own into its university sitting right in Ancor's backyard. The mandate is to support Minnesota businesses in high technology such as disk drives, computers, and the like. Brocade takes full advantage of these university resources which is fine since most of the money is federal. The high energy physics folks at CERN is an OK idea too. I do not know their computing set up explicitly but I am sure they have large backup requirements. In this case, Ancor would get a number in a report. I would rather get both a splash and a number :-) Kurt