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

To: Alohal who wrote (50957)	3/9/1999 5:23:00 PM
From: yard_man	Respond to of 132070

>>Now if IDC says shipments up, dollar volume of shipments up, << I'll have to re-read it, but I think they were talking predictions here ..

To: Alohal who wrote (50957)	3/9/1999 5:57:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 132070

Aloha, This time you finally raised some interesting points that are worthy of discussion. First, you have to seperate IDC's counting of beans from a previous year from its forecasts for the current year. They are not bad as bean counters. They, and Dataquest, have been total disasters as forecasters. Totally different tasks. There is absolutely no question that if IDC's forecasts for 1999 are not incredibly overly optimistic for the first time in their history, then dollar sales will be up. But they will not even be close, as usual. Nobody ever asks them how lousy their forecasting record has been, but it has been pitiful. Not as bad as Texas Instruments in the chip area, but still, pretty bad. As far as Dell's market share goes, I never said they didn't gain share year over year. Just that they had their worst sequential 3Q to 4Q share loss ever. They may gain share this year, though their main strength, the corporate market, looks dead on arrival. But, if so, it will be higher share in a rapidly declining market. While selling at 80 times eps. A recipe for disaster if there has ever been one. MB

To: Alohal who wrote (50957)	3/9/1999 6:20:00 PM
From: Eggolas Moria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

In case you missed this nugget of information: San Jose, Calif., February 24, 1999—The U.S. server market experienced mixed results as revenue dropped 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 1998, while U.S. server shipments grew 15.9 percent over the fourth quarter of last year, according to Dataquest Inc., a unit of Gartner Group, Inc. (NYSE: IT). The decrease in revenue is due to falling prices resulting in U.S. server revenue of $4.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 1998, down from $4.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 1997. Shipments reached 306,000 units. "Entry level server unit growth was greater than 19 percent, but revenues remained flat, as technology differentiation in this segment has all but disappeared and logistics execution has become more important," said Angela Dehzad, analyst for Dataquest's Servers Quarterly Statistics United States program. IBM held onto the No. 1 position in the fourth quarter despite flat growth over last year. Compaq had low growth of 4.6 percent, but remained in the No. 2 position. Three of the top five vendors showed very positive year-over-year growth, with Dell growing an astounding 95.3 percent (see Table 1). Table 1 U.S. Server Revenue Estimates for Fourth Quarter 1998 (Millions of Dollars) Company Q4/97 Revenue Q4/97 Market Share (%) Q4/98 Revenue Q4/98 Market Share (%) Growth (%) IBM 1,346 29.1 1,351 30.5 0.3 Compaq 711 15.4 744 16.8 4.6 Hewlett-Packard 580 12.5 685 15.4 17.9 Sun Microsystems 476 10.3 572 12.9 20.3 Dell 128 2.8 250 5.6 95.3 Others 1,389 30.0 832 18.8 -40.1 Total 4,631 100.0 4,433 100.0 -4.3 Source: Dataquest (December 1998)