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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Hauser who wrote (84916)	12/11/1998 12:57:00 PM
From: John Hauser	Respond to of 176387

Wrong! Rear Echelon Revelations: The 18-Wheeler Called Unseen Progress By James J. Cramer Progress is that 18-wheeler coming at you doing 80 while you're stuck in the slow lane. You either go faster or you get off the road. It is the roaring hidden variable, the quiet blitz that changes everything. Three years ago, while sitting down at the end of the year to do one of those thumb-suckers, I wanted to pronounce the personal computer dead. The CD-ROM "craze," which was the latest reason to own a personal computer, had pretty much run its course. The proportion of American households that owned personal computers seemed to be stuck at 40% permanently. I remember discussing doing a swan song piece about how tech had maxed out for my old editor at New York magazine, Kurt Andersen, kind of one of those early obituaries for an industry that got as far as it was going to go. Never wrote that piece. Got on the Net. The rest is history. I was thinking about this amazing battle between unseen progress and seen stasis because I broke my Dell (Nasdaq:DELL - news) Pentium I the other day. The first thing that popped into my head was "%^#^&%#^# how come this had to happen during the (&^(&%(*^&% holiday season. I am a dead man. I will never get a Pentium II Dell, it will take forever. (It has, which has me bigger in the stock than I have been in some time.) Who would have thought that this mature industry would have reinvented itself and found a way to get up to 100% penetration, a la TV, but, better than TV, creating models that go with you, allowing for people to have a couple of PCs each! Name me another technology that is forcing the 50-year-olds out there, the guys who reveled in having their assistants use the personal computer for them, to learn QWERTY. Heck, these devices are outmoding the assistants themselves! Why am I waxing on and on, pollyanna-style? Because when we think of numbers, when we think of the estimates and how companies are going to make them, we must have a healthy regard for that unseen 18-wheeler. Dell, in 1995, shouldn't have been able to make the 1998 estimates then available. It will blow through them handily, because of unforeseen positives. This whole new go round into old tech -- the stuff in your personal computers -- shouldn't have been happening. The industry was supposed to be moribund by now. It didn't happen that way. And that's why estimates at great companies get beaten all of the time.

To: John Hauser who wrote (84916)	12/11/1998 12:59:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 176387

john - Dell composes about 50% of my port and that's only because It has grown to be that large of a %. I certainly understand that - my DELL position was about 12% of my holdings and has grown to be 40% with no additional purchase. my timeframe is very long. I also consider DELL to be an excellent long term holding, and even if I reduce my stake I will continue to hold some DELL, just as I hold MSFT and INTC. But not everyone on the thread can take the long view, or should.