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Technology Stocks : LSI Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (18622)	5/29/1999 3:23:00 PM
From: DavidG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25814

Since when did Moore's Law apply to autos?<ggg> I would just settle for a Nonpolutant car that got 100mpg and cost $10k.:-) DavidG

To: Tony Viola who wrote (18622)	5/29/1999 8:52:00 PM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

Tony: No doubt INTC brought the cost of computing down. But I will not be convinced that having one company control 92% of a segment is a good thing. It just defies belief. For example consider the low end PC market. INTC did not help the world there! It was AMD and NSM who 'created' this market. Why didn't INTC say you know what no one needs this Pentium 3 power schtick let's create a cheaper PC? Well it was in their best interests (their shareholders' interests) not to do so and justifiably so! But that is the beauty of competition - AMD and NSM saw an opening and took it. Then later on INTC gets a tad worried and blasts into the market blasting the competition in the meantime. My point again is that INTC would NOT have created this market if there was no push from elsewhere to do so. For another look at INTC's margins! In theory when you have a product selling 100 million units a year there ought to be more than one company involved. Or else: the dominant company makes boatloads of money and everyone else gets dumped into the toilet. In theory those margins should have attracted competition and INTC's margins should have come down. Yet they did not. You may think it is manufacturing prowess and I certainly agree that this is a large part of it. But ala Microsoft there must have been some big time arm-twisting going on here - something that the OEMs can relate to. Show me an OEM that loves to buy from one supplier and I'll show you a sychophant (sp?) or a company going out of biz. As to INTC lowering unit costs, that comes part and parcel with the semi biz. Lower unit prices to stir up demand. In theory the loss in unit price will be made up by the gain in unit demand. Ask yourself why INTC is lowering prices at a more rapid price these days? Also another thing about INTC is how no sooner does the Fed antitrust thing die down than they announce they are going aggressively after the low end. Maybe it was just a coincidence or maybe not. I think in addition they want to squeeze AMD's bottom line so that AMD cannot ramp up its new processor. And why? Because INTC knows or should know that AMD eating into their high end market will be a real disaster to INTC's margins and long term happiness. INTC in the meantime is using there sinfully large profits from their high end chips as a war chest to chase everyone else out. I really hope the Feds revisit this mess. Just to give INTC something to think about. BTW INTC is nowhere close to as cheesy and crummy as the other half of the Wintel duopoly. That company, with their antics - Oh we are doing this for the consumer's sake blah blah blah - disgusts me so much I don't know where to begin. They use the same tactic as INTC does - use profits from one line, in MSFT's case Windows operating system, to squeeze out other companies from databases (Access vs. Paradox), spreadsheets (Excel vs. Lotus), application development tools (Borland C++ tool vs. Microsofts) and soon to be RealAudio and whoever else they deem to be irrelevant. In addition they of course did not let everyone in on the latest changes to the operating system - something INTC was accused of in another segment (I think - I am alluding to the lawsuit by some soon to go busted company 'I....' something). I love that statement from someone about the operating system and Linux's aim - 'To bring down the value of the operating system'. Microsoft never foresaw free stuff but that is what happens when people are disgusted with borgs and Microsoft (alongwith Intel) are big borgs. Open environments are good. No company that closes stuff or makes it difficult for others to get in by way of 'underhanded' or 'heavyhanded' tactics should be allowed to go on scot-free. There is a difference between fairly winning and winning at all costs. The attitudes of Andy Grove (Paranoia) and Bill Gates (Paranoia) should indicate which track they have taken. They should have been busted a long time ago. Now it is too late. But I hope their entry into new markets is not going to be easy. Surely other companies know of their crap and are not going to make it easy. A company that is just as dominant but I sense plays fairly is CSCO. They at least buy out the stuff they need - on the other hand Microsoft uses the befriend-and-absorb technique and INTC uses the faster-is-always-good-for-you-trust-me technique. Note unlike CSCO these are still predominately one track ponies and they may just have no choice. But still this does not make it right. As to the car analogy, what 'software' equivalent would be using to run our fabulous cars and just how big would our cars be - after all 4 passengers can't fit inside a PC desktop? Remember that comparing cars to computers is comparing apples to oranges or more likely silicon to steel. One has Moore's law and the other has ??? It is not just PCs by the way. It is all silicon based stuff. Consider calculators, mainframes, PalmPilots, wireless devices and on and on. INTC's 'generosity' was not responsible for advances in all these lines - no, more likely, it was the 'luck' of producing a product (semiconductors) that could be made exponentially faster and exponentially cheaper. It was the Physics not the companies.