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Technology Stocks : Phoenix Technologies (PTEC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John B. Dillon who wrote (2909)	11/21/1998 11:25:00 AM
From: Mark Brophy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3624

Re: Your questions If companies can get a $0.25 BIOS, why would anyone pay extra for a custom BIOS? There was an article in the WSJ yesterday and the answer is that if you're a German, you probably don't pay extra. PCs in Germany cost 15% less than in the U.S. and everything else costs much more. Vobis, a German PC vendor, was the largest Award shareholder. American vendors have successfully differentiated themselves with minor features and widely known brand names, but Germans are smarter shoppers. Compaq hardly sells any PCs in Germany. What level of BIOS is IBM and Compaq getting and what are they paying? That's one of the unknowns you must cope with if you own this stock. Earnings reports indicate that they're not paying very much, so investors have lost faith in management. A large institutional investor, Wasatch Partners, sold all their shares, as did several long-term holders on this thread. I heard Jack say PTEC will get significantly higher ASP's for the Merced chips. Will the increased engineering costs allow PTEC to make significantly higher profits? The Merced ramp will be slow, so it won't affect profits for several years. In addition, past experience indicates that Phoenix isn't adept at negotiating with Intel. Is Microsoft putting more features in their software and therefore will even lower ASP's prevail? Microsoft and Intel have moved power management features out of the BIOS and into the O.S. This is one of the reasons BIOS prices decrease only 15% annually. Phoenix gets paid for any change - even for removing code! Code also has been added to the BIOS to manage the interface between the hardware and the O.S. I heard that NT needs a smaller BIOS. Is this correct and if so does PTEC get lower ASP's for NT PC sales? No. WinNT needs to run Windows apps, so the BIOS couldn't be made smaller. Very good point about the analysts game, but why wouldn't PTEC blow their numbers away this quarter with the healthy state of the industry? I think they will, but that's still not very impressive. Blowing away a 60 cents expectation may seem great, but they earned 87 cents a couple of years ago. Again very good point about ROM pilot, but I thought I heard that they had 8 ROM Pilot customers and I read a analyst report stating that they may get $0.50 a copy. Obviously they must not be getting near $0.50, but what are they getting and how will that effect this quarters profits? A niche product can't be profitable with a 50 cent royalty. Award can sell a high volume BIOS for 50 cents, but there's no way ROMPilot can do the same. The royalty rate is another unknown and there are so many unknowns that investing in this company is a bet on management, and that hasn't been smart the last couple of years. Jules Garfunkel asks Jack Kay each quarter at the conference call to justify the huge R&D expenses, but the results indicate that there isn't an answer. Why declare a dividend? Why not just retire more stock? They have sufficient cash to declare a dividend, retire boatloads of stock, and make acquisitions on the scale of Award, Sand, and Virtual Chips. The central problem with this company is that they've been unable to replace a slowly suffocating business with something on the other end of the growth curve. There are no easy answers. The company needs to make a bold move along with the attendant risk.

To: John B. Dillon who wrote (2909)	11/23/1998 7:42:00 AM
From: Marc Phelan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3624

Rom-Pilot (How do it work? <grin>) Is this the function of Rom-Pilot? United States Patent 5,836,013 Greene, et. al. Nov. 10, 1998 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Method and apparatus for compressing system read only memory in a computing system Abstract A chipset (platform)-independent method and apparatus for compressing and decompressing a system ROM of a computer (e.g., BIOS, setup program, and one or more option ROMs) are disclosed. The setup program, option ROM, and part of the BIOS are compressed using a lossless compression algorithm. A non-compressible portion of the BIOS includes a decompression algorithm and a shadow RAM block table of chipset-specific registers and bit patterns to write-enable and read-enable shadow RAM (RAM that is mapped to the ROM address space). The compressed data is stored in a compressed data block format with the associated location in memory to decompress the compressed data. Thus, the data can be decompressed anywhere in memory of a target computer. For example, the BIOS is decompressed to shadow RAM and the setup program is decompressed to conventional memory. During the BIOS Power-On Self-Test (POST) process, the compressed system ROM is copied to conventional memory, and the decompression program is executed. The decompression program write-enables shadow RAM (with reference to the the chipset-specific information in the shadow RAM block table), copies the non-compressible BIOS from conventional memory to shadow RAM, and read-enables shadow RAM. The decompression program scans the compressed system ROM for compressed data blocks and decompresses the compressed data therein to the associated locations in memory. If compressed data is located in shadow RAM, shadow RAM is enabled for writing and reading with reference to the chipset-specific information in the shadow RAM block table. If compressed data was decompressed to conventional memory space, this space is cleared before exiting the POST process. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inventors: Greene; Todd Michael (Hacienda Heights, CA); Hallin, Jr.; John Edward (Aliso Viego, CA). Assignee: Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (San Jose, CA). Appl. No.: 289,104 Filed: Aug. 11, 1994