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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Koligman who wrote (21123)	5/30/1999 9:04:00 AM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

John, I think that another "feature" of Gerstner's management is overlooked and that is the smart use of debt. IBM used to be proud for being debt free, but that is not necessarily smart, when you can get debt at 6% or less and your return on assets is much greater than that, some use of debt (without risking too much of it) is very smart since it lets you use "other people money" to improve returns on your stockholders equity. I have seen many people complaining of IBM debt on the balance sheet, and I think these people are wrong. Zeev

To: John Koligman who wrote (21123)	5/30/1999 11:35:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

John, OT, kind of, IBM. IBM has a huge advantage in RAS with MVS and the mainframe. I enjoy jousting with some of the posters on the Intel thread that are impatient with the Merced delays, as they think as soon as that chip is available, that will kill off the mainframe. Yes that is fun over there. Haven't seen Mary lately. Hope everything is OK with her. She stirs that pot the best. I'm still trying to figure out IBM's stiffarm of Rambus at this point. Probably the performance/availability/proprietary combination, like a bird in the hand, where PC133 SDRAM is as fast (according to IBM), and doesn't have the yield problems, and doesn't involve royalties. Having typed it out like that, it looks like a compelling argument on IBM's part. There are also the transmission line problems on motherboards with the 800 Megabit per second transfers. I've been concerned about that since day one, as there are not many companies that know how to handle switching speeds that high. Some that signed up to work with it I'll bet didn't even know what the problems are. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, with IBM on one side and Rambus/Intel on the other. Tony