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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (81178)	5/18/1999 7:52:00 PM
From: Paul Jamerson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Whether the PC/TV combo will overtake the low end PC is still unclear. Your point about the oversea manufacturers overtaking the US manufactures in the low end will happen. My belief is that the biggest benefactors of the low cost PC will be the Taiwan PC manufacturer and foundries. Acer is already seeing new life in their business, UMC and TSMC will eventually get business from AMD to produce the low end microprocessors. I personally believe that low end PC will be the internet appliance. The manufacturer will have ever more powerful systems at a lower price in the future canabalizing the home PC market. In the US where many household have more than one PC, the consumer will upgrade less often, favoring a internet appliance. Overseas in developing countries, where consumers are first time PC buyers (similar to the U.S. a couple of years ago) will purchase the most powerful system available. In the business world the same trend is just beginning. With the end result similar to what happend in the consumer market. In the server world the profit will continue to be good and growth continues. So what does all this mean. Intel will continue to make money. The sales growth will continue to rise, but the gross margin will continue to fall. The overall earnings growth rate will stay flat. This will continue Intel develops new markets. Intel has hugh potential in the set top, cable modem, networking market with StrongArm. Especially, Intel's strong technical reputation, manufacturing capabilities.

To: Amy J who wrote (81178)	5/18/1999 7:53:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Amy, I'm hoping that with technologies like the Whitney chipset, Intel can get some initiatives going into driving the PC onto the set-top. Perhaps this is a question that can be best answered by people in Intel Architecture Labs. I already saw a few projects there which were focused on a kind of PC-VCR using the hard drive as storage and Intel processing power for software-based encoding and decoding. The upcoming 500 MHz Celeron should easily be able to handle such tasks. Then throw in a Whitney chipset, a case no larger than a pizza box, a DVD drive, and Instant-On technology, and you'll have a serious "set-top PC." Now if only the OS and software could follow along. The PC's reliance on the bloated Windows OS could be a huge stumbling block in this transition to the set-top market. Tenchusatsu

To: Amy J who wrote (81178)	5/18/1999 9:13:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Amy, Re "Will the USA PC crew be willing to change its philosophical strategy and mindset by putting energy onto the low-end market (or will they only do so with AOL's encouragement?) New product developments tend to focus most energy/funds onto the higher-margin products... ...Sometimes this leaves a wonderful entry for the overseas crew (e.g. TV/PC crew) to enter with lower-margin products (since the USA tends to avoid them) which reach commodity high-volume levels, with superior ease-of-use capabilities, consumer friendliness, but unfortunately may broadside the PC crew on the low-end." The equity structure makes it difficult for major US PC companies to go after the true low end. Companies like DELL, GTW, CPQ, HP have to show reasonable margins- thats why some-one like e-machines can flourish. The next driver for the true low end ($200-300) range requires a recurring revenue stream to offset no profits on the hardware. It is not clear to me that the Internet ad revenue model generates enough money. Clearly the game consoles have been very successfull with the low cost up front approach - and charging very high prices for the games. Certainly conventional PC companies cannot win in this space as their business plans are to to make margin on the hardware. However I cans certainly see a major internet play such as AOL, Yahoo etc buy up/venture with the game console guys. Should be pretty interesting. Regards, Kash