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To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (7725)	3/19/1999 6:00:00 PM
From: C_Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Hello Katherine, "I doubt that lenders will be willing to fund similarly profligate expenditures without a significant recovery in chip sales. In the long term, it depends on how long the up leg lasts and how the underlying chip markets do." I might refer to this too many times but you have cited the $64k question. A couple of charts to add to the debate - there are a number of datapoints we can add to this story but for now, these two will probably stimulate some discussion. :-) infras.com infras.com Regards, Carl infras.com

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (7725)	3/19/1999 11:18:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10921

Hi Katherine, It wasn't a personal attack by strict definitions of the term, but it didn't seem to me to contribute much, either. Oops, failed my professional journalist test once again. I guess I'll never make editor neither. John, My apology, if you actually took the original post as a personal attack or belittlement rather than a disagreement with the conclusions presented. I still disagree with the conclusions. Carl J, Very interesting graphs as usual. If I'm reading the Unit Growth graph correctly, it appears that starting with the quarter beginning in April the Year over Year comparisons get easier and the graph should once again start to turn up. Without the actual magnitudes and only the change in growth %, it's extraordinarily difficult for me to get any real meaning out of the graph. Re the ASP graph: It appears that with the transition to smaller feature sizes, that even though unit costs are declining in consumer terms such as number of Megabytes of SDRAM or 100s of MIPS of processing power, there are more transistors per chip and thus a larger unit selling price. i.e. everyone benefits except the guys who make the wafers. More equipment sold by equipment makers to chip makers who get more $ per chips sold to OEMs who use less chips per device but sell more devices to consumers who, in turn, pay less for more power. [Katherine, Please don't grade the previous paragraph-sentence on journalistic quality. It made sense to me. ;-)] But some people are much more eager to make that point when the out-of-context data disagrees with their preconceptions than when it reinforces them. Great point. George Soros is about the only one that I know of who systematically looks for evidence that his firmly held beliefs are wrong. And I assure you, I an not, nor will I ever be a Soros. For example, I mistrust the pronouncement from an analyst that IBM will have trouble making its quarter due to more Mainframe competition. If that statement hadn't been made on a triple witching Friday, I'd give it more credibility. But coming today, it only makes me suspect that Morgan Stanley probably had one "truck"load of options that were about to go strongly against them. Strange that the Rubin rumour surfaced again on a triple witching Friday, isn't it. George Soros may have given this stuff more credibility. I think jail time would be more appropriate for market manipulators. FWIW, Ian.