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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (14290)	2/11/1999 7:09:00 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Crushing competition: After trailing rivals for years, sales of International Business Machines Corp.'s mainframe computers are booming, thanks to a new generation of faster, cheaper machines. Big Blue is so eager to regain market share that it is cutting deals to buy competing machines, such as Amdahl Corp.'s Millenniums and Hitachi Ltd.'s Skylines, from customer sites and replace them with IBMs. So what does IBM do with rivals' mainframes? It has quietly installed a mainframe-crushing machine, much like a car crusher, at its Poughkeepsie, N.Y., factory. In recent months, scores of competitors' machines have been smashed, though an IBM spokesman declines to confirm the existence of the machine. Amdahl and Hitachi, which also buy competitors' mainframes but resell the machines and their parts through brokers, aren't too happy about IBM's move. "Clearly, Skyline has touched a raw nerve at IBM," says a Hitachi spokesman. Adds a spokesman for Amdahl: "They can't afford to let those machines back out into the market at any price so they are trying to take them off the face of this planet. It looks like an offensive strategy but is actually a very defensive strategy." * * *