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To: Ausdauer who wrote (5923)	6/4/1999 4:26:00 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Respond to of 60323

Aus and thread: Intel, while it made its microprocessors do more things faster, was successful essentially because it was able to get more transistors on a given space than its competitors. Eight years ago, when I was discussing this point with one of the INTC executives, he pointed out that he though Intel would gradually lose its edge here, but even so would stay just enough ahead of the competition to provide the best performance for the price. As Intel brings out better versions, it drops prices on older chips, thereby squeezing competitors, making it more difficult for them to plow more money into research and development. SNDK seems to be using a similar strategy, improving its product performance from a given factory, and immediately bringing those improvements to market. The price of older CF drops, and the competition scrambles to keep up. The strategy works as long as the company can find and keep the best engineers and designers. The moment competitors get better personnel, SNDK could lose its edge. Meanwhile, with good people on board, SNDK will be able to continue getting new patents approved, ensuring an income stream not only from cf sales but from royalties. The whole thing works as long as the people working at SNDK are tops in talent and ingenuity.

To: Ausdauer who wrote (5923)	6/4/1999 11:32:00 PM
From: Gary Spiers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Would it be possible, for example, to create a CF module that housed the OS and could be upgraded at the users discretion with subsequent versions? Yes, this is exactly the principle that the obsolete OB300 in my previous post does except that it used a type II ROM card but there was nothing to stop the user from replacing the card with another that had a different OS on it provided they could located suitable drivers for all of the laptops hardware. Todays problem is that it would be hard to fit a MS OS on the typical 40/48MB card. I don't think you would want to partition a CF device for RAM or cache - it is much slower to read/write to than conventional RAM/cache. GaryS

To: Ausdauer who wrote (5923)	6/5/1999 10:21:00 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Re: CF and Microprocessors The key to the Wintel duopoly is the countless billions of lines of code which have been written to this architecture over the years as well as the tens of millions of person-years of training invested in the production, support, and use of this software. While this investment by itself does not preclude Wintel's obsolescence (IBM continues to enjoy an equally, if diminishingly, formidable advantage with its mainframe architecture and software base) it takes many, many years to displace a computing standard like this. So if one is looking for proprietary systems that have similar potential to Wintel or IBM's mainframes one needs to look at the factors which provide the "lock in". In the case of CF, it is difficult to draw direct comparisons because there are few, if any, "applications" written for CF and no investment in "user training". CF, like all storage, is a black box as far as the user is concerned: it's only attributes are price and capacity. Similarly, while the OS provides support for CF, it is just another removable storage device as far as programs are concerned and it has no "APIs" of its own that can provide a technological "hook" to ensnare the software writer. Given that storage is ultimately a commodity, one has to look further up the food chain to find the potential for serious proprietary value. For example, EMC has managed to build an empire by taking commodity building blocks (disk drives) and packaging them into Storage Systems which allow businesses not just to store but to manage their ever-growing mountains of business-critical information. Again, it is the software that gives EMC its edge. So when looking at the CF opportunity, I would look for companies that have unique software or other capabilities that leverages CF to add value. For example, Data-Disk Technology, Inc. (http://www.datadisk.com) provides both software as well as physical encapsulation technology to provide highly ruggedized "digital dog tags" which can be used to record medical and other personal information.