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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gbh who wrote (46583)	2/11/1999 1:08:00 PM
From: Earlie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Gary: A visit to electronics stores can be useful. Many have converted the former large shelf space devoted to PCs over to "home theatre" (big TVs, big sound). car audio, video and "white goods". This Christmas, they made money there and not on PCs, so the trend is likely to continue. Some have cut multi-line PC situations to a single line, and handed inventory, sales etc. over to the PC producer's own people,....the "Kiosk" approach. Compare ad size devoted to PCs now with a year or two ago,....big reversal. The big warehouse chains are openly "disenchanted" with the lack of margins in the PC sector. Walmart gave up entirely a while back. These are facts that you can verify yourself. On the business front, who am I to argue with IDC and the big resellers. They all say, "forget 1999". Corporate is the large fraction. With respect to "service" margins, check last 8 quarterlies of IBM. Their figures don't "demonstrate it", they state it. Black and white. (See breakdown of revenues). I agree with you on the redundancy point. You see continued growth, I see a PC deep freeze this year. You think everybody will upgrade, I think without new apps, they won't. Obviously you expect a continuing ascent by Dell, GTW, HWP, MSFT, IBM, CPQ, etc. I think they are about to be crunched. Time will tell. One last point if I might. Dell seems to be your favourite. "A pure play". That it is. The stock price reflects an expectation of continued (50% per annum?) bottom line growth. This can only occur if the PC industry itself grows significantly, or if Dell successfully continues to grab market share. Most observers would not argue the slowing of PC revenues over the last few years, but perhaps that will abruptly change? Unlikely.. So now we are down to a reliance on that market theft point. I would contend, that the longer the game continues, the tougher it gets to so do. At these prices, even a marginal hint that this is not occurring will leave a crater. I'll stay with Darth on this one. best, Earlie