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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Engel who wrote (62815)	8/19/1998 10:37:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Paul, Apple had an elitist policy and positioned themselves that way, manufacturer and user. When they were the only game in town they were fine as they went from the II+ to the Mac series. Gates of course figured it out and visited the Xerox shrine and pursued the same path. His object was to get $50 from each machine. Intel also made the CPUs and they also wanted a reasonable profit. This meant that soon machines from the big names, like IBM CPQ etc were for sale at 30-40% cheaper than Apple. The screwdriver shops were 50% cheaper that Apple. The Apple ostrich was quite content, the sand was warm, and dark and all was well in the world . the marketers were dolts of the first water(Jobs was one of them too, he has an impressive list of qualifications in that direction). They tried cloning with the expected results due to the bad structure of the cloning agreements(the cloners made only expensive clones due to a flat clone fee). Now they have cut costs and stripped off the many layers of deadwood and are making money. As long as they select a course that makes their product reasonably cost effective they will get a portion of the market. They are profitable at this share as they are still a large company(3% of the PC world is a nice sized company) and as long as they avoid huge errors that cost millions they will gradually pull ahead. This all depends on a succession of CPU chips that they can follow to the future(it seems that this is secure via Mot/IBM and 1 other whose name escapes me). In the past they went off on bonehead tangents and pissed away mone like the proverbial drunken sailor, buying deadwood OS's that were later thrown away. Dumb. However they will not really grow their share unless they broaden their production base(I mean clones). They need to expand the APple universe with other than holy writ from mother Apple via a reasonable fee based clone system with the fees capability based. So an iMac clone might have a $50 fee and an OS sale to be Apples profit and a top end G3 machine might have a $200-300 ?? fee plus the OS profit. This would allow a smaller parallel Apple universe, like the Wintel one where a diversity of standard cases, mice, keyboards power supplies, software and external hardware can evolve. This will be eased by the USB which will cause a peripheral convergence so Apples will run the same devices and WIntels in the next 2-3 years. Do you think this sounds logical? Bill