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Technology Stocks : DELL Bear Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: put2rich who wrote (1655)	8/25/1998 8:47:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2578

Hi thanh dao; All those special sound/video/interface cards are getting stuck on a single chip. As far as cables &c. goes, you eliminate these by putting the components on the same board. Take a look at a floppy disk drive from 5 years ago and compare it with the current model. Note that the current model has a lot of empty space on the PC-board. Same with hard disk drive. Cables are a sign of low integration. As integration increases, the cables go away. So do (most) of the adapter. cards. People just don't need them anymore, standard computers are satisfying peoples' needs. Now put 2 and 2 together. Why do you have all those cables and stuff to connect together a bunch of empty PC boards and to allow replaceable components? They are waste. So remove them. Put all the components on a single PC board. Make your machine standard. Sure it is harder to repair, but machines are running more reliably every year, and having fewer cables &c. means a machine that needs repair less often. No user serviceable parts. A customer would have to be insane to want to swap the floppy disk for an alternate model. So why not integrate it onto the mother board? You eliminate the floppy cable. Take a look at the new computer from Apple. It integrates the monitor along with everything else. It appears to be successful. This is what customers want, and this is what is cheapest to build. Look at the customers. People are buying machines and never cracking the case. I can remember when you used to have to be able to solder in order to connect up a printer. Times are changing, in a very easy to predict way. Computers are getting easier and easier to use, and this trend will undeniably continue. Easier to use means that they come with what you need and don't require hardware modifications (like adding cards.) The trend is to a simpler, cheaper, easier to use computer. This is what the customer wants. This is what engineering can deliver. This is where the bulk of the market is going. The high end is going to be squeezed tighter and tighter. Profits will drop off there, and so will the companies that try to compete there. -- Carl