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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James A. Shankland who wrote (24648)	11/17/1998 10:46:00 PM
From: Steve Porter	Respond to of 45548

James, First off, sorry I came accross a little more nasty than I meant to. I haven't had sufficient sleep lately ;-) Now the reason I say COMS cards are better than Intel NICs has very little to do with the hardware at all. It has to do with drivers (I have had fewer problems with the COMS stuff than the INTC stuff). I also like the PACE stuff and do find it useful (in case you don't know, PACE allows packet prioritization on COMS nics.. I haven't seen this for Intel NICS). Intel's NICS hardware isn't bad. I have found their rate of DOA parts is slightly higher than COMS, but I'm only talking about 3% or so (this is based on numbers I have been able to gather from across campus). The advantage that Intel has at the moment is their supply is more readily available. Steve PS. Good to have the net back at home.. was dying and had 192 e-mail messages waiting (ouch!)

To: James A. Shankland who wrote (24648)	11/17/1998 11:19:00 PM
From: joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

James, I'll have to look up the post again, but my understanding is that COMS sells NICs to the higher end desktop market, while INTC sells to the lower end desktop market. The COMS NICs have a reputation for better quality and more sophistication, but it will be a constant race between them. COMS will have an advantage in the future, because they are geared better towards the manufacturing process of these network products. INTC does not know networks that well, and has just acquired smaller companies here and there. Also, COMS just came out with the IBM OEM contract and will possibly come out with another OEM contract very soon, so the balance of market share, etc. is still a moving target. Even if INTC sells more units, it's more important for COMS at this point to just increase sales and decrease costs. Lastly, COMS is much more than a NICs company, and eventually this will be a smaller part of the business. COMS has a broad range of areas it's well prepared to go into. So, there's lots of ways to look at this whole game...it has many, many variables. joe