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

To: victor pan who wrote (3678)	8/7/1998 12:16:00 AM
From: WebDrone	Respond to of 8218

Victor- You think MSFT is big business? IBM is HUGE compared to MSFT. IBM sells more software than MSFT, and has more JAVA programmers than SUN. It's true! IBM has more patents issued, by far, than any other company. Year after year. Big Blue research has recently shown that they are motivated to get stuff out of the lab and on to the shelves in Quick Order-- a great change in the way things used to be. Patents in Semiconductors, hardware, networking and software. It's an IBM patent minefield out there, and it pays BIG money. Big Iron computers- you need them to crank on the web, and to replace your old thingy by the year 2000. Mainframes are the way to go if you want to do a payroll, or mundane stuff like that. (I'm more of a mathematician/science type, myself.) Semiconductors-- very great stuff coming out. New technology to reduce heat and capacitance will open new design possibilities that INTC will need to pay royalties on to get. And they will need to rush to get it, along with everyone else. Who knows how to do it? IBM. Will the new Power PC chips have a performance edge over Intel? They already do, at lower power consumption. (heat and battery life.) Well, IBM laptops are the best, except for the Mac laptops- which happen to use PowerPC processors! Win-Win. For the same clock speed, PPC is a lot faster for graphics- and that's what boggs me down. IBM makes competitive desktop PCs, and they can finance and service them. Service is a big deal, when you need to work, not fix your computer. Sales is a big deal. Competitive networking gear... they can do your whole company and make it work. Yeah, it'll cost ya- but you know it will work, instead of wonder. Jeeze Victor- this is an exciting company that you can still get for a fair price! I suggest you order an IR package from ibm.com While you are there, look around. I've spent many night exploring their site, and I still haven't scratched the surface. Good Stuff, Check it out! WebDrone (sorry if I come off too enthusiastic- its just that I have been trading too much lately, except I have no desire to sell my IBM under any circumstances. I know IBM will be there in 10 years, Microsoft- I dunno, they are a new kid, relatively speaking.)

To: victor pan who wrote (3678)	8/7/1998 10:25:00 AM
From: Mark Brophy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8218

IBM is losing more market share. This time it's in workstations. techweb.com

To: victor pan who wrote (3678)	8/7/1998 4:24:00 PM
From: Arrow Hd.	Respond to of 8218

Victor, I think some recent posts have covered a lot of the points needed to address the issue you raise so I wont boil the ocean here. One point to keep in mind is that if markets are expanding rapidly, you can lose market share but still grow in relative terms. That is basically what IBM has done in many of the hardware areas and to offset that they have grown in areas like services, intellectual property, technology sales and OEM (in particular, DASD). Mainframes are highly profitable but in raw terms only about 5 billion in hardware sales per year. Software and the rest of the glass house add considerably more. Microsoft is an example of what happens when a dominant company like IBM, in an emerging technology and marketplace (PCs) does not have it's strategic eye out for futures. MSFT was hired to develop DOS for the first IBM PC and then basically walked away with all the intellectual property. This was a contractual error of the Nth magnitude. One of the 20th Century's worst industrial mistakes. Anyway, they did and they took off with the PC explosion.