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Technology Stocks : Adaptec (ADPT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (3305)	8/1/1998 8:02:00 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5944

Wow. Your investment style is about as different from mine as can be. I don't buy a stock unless I can envision it doubling, and ride for the long haul. JMHO.

To: Tony Viola who wrote (3305)	8/2/1998 10:18:00 AM
From: Jim Switz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5944

Tony, I believe the sentence you bolded in your posting: "Adding to Adaptec's woes is Intel's incorporation of a similar technology on its standard chip sets, making the technology essentially free." likely refers to 1394 technology, not SCSI. A couple of months ago, Intel said it was dropping the planned 1394 integration into its latest chipsets and told its OEMs specifically to go get 1394 from Symbios or Adaptec if they wanted it. This does not mean, however, that INTC may not add these functions later. It's not clear to me that 1394 will be or can be a replacement for SCSI, especially now that SCSI has evolved to Ultra 2 and soon will be at Ultra 3 technology. I'm not an I/O expert, so I'm not denying it; it's just not apparent to me. I/O technologies are evolving, and while adding IDE to a motherboard is almost free, that's not true of other I/O (except maybe USB, which is irrelevent to our discussions). Adding SCSI, 1394 or Fibre Channel to a motherboard adds significant cost and complexity in a time when OEMs are wanting to get costs down, not up. Allowing OEMs to add their customer's preferred I/O only where needed is probably a more cost-effective solution in today's build-to-order market evolution led by Dell, Gateway and recently joined by Compaq, HP and IBM to some extent. This phenomenon was even commented on during the conference call, where it was stated that there is a swing back to adding controller boards as needed rather than building specialized I/O onto every motherboard. We'll see how all this plays out. For sure, with UIDE offering decent performance on desktop systems (albeit without the many advantages of SCSI beyond single-thread speed), the penetration of SCSI in mainstream machines is down and will likely stay down unless SCSI hard disks become more price competitive. It's up to ADPT to get their costs down, introduce new higher-end technology, promote their satellite cards and unique software and figure out how to go after new markets.