George said:
Numbers were public for spot market trading in chips - they could not have
been making a profit. It showed in their profit & loss statements.
There is no product of the imagination that Western civilization could
produce as greater evidence of what is possible with human intellect
than a P&L.
I fail to see the relevance between Gates and Micron. Certainly little
guys should not be persecuted while big fish escape - justice is worth
pursuing but is not always realized... but the rule book should not be
thrown away or perverted with prejudice.
But the rule book is perverted with prejudice--against small players.
What litigation does is to turn those rules upside down, much as
guerilla tactics change the rules of warfare. Business is business and
warfare is warfare, but they are both examples of human beings playing
to win.
The memory mfrs are publicly owned companies
Like Enron?
and have a responsibility to
act accordingly in making deals and in their corporate behavior.
Like Enron.
It's a
fine line to walk when losing money.
Companies have a tendency to be making money when reporting to current
or potential lenders and investors and to be losing it when reporting to
the tax man or pleading poverty to get corporate welfare.
I know the dealings of only closely-held companies, for which the rules
are more relaxed, from first-hand experience. Profit is an amazingly
flexible number, especially if it is, for example, to be shared with
others. Ask anyone in the film business. Never accept a cut on net as
your part of the deal, no matter how good you think your auditor is.
As to prices, I believe most readily what I know from first-hand
experience. Even in a commodity industry, where prices move in a very
narrow range, everything important happens at the margins. A quarter
dollar per unit could be your net profit, when most prices move in a
well-known range twice that size.
Even if you're in a commodity business, you might have something that
isn't a commodity to sell that makes all those commodity sales worth the
bother. The commodity sales "lose" money, but they help to pay the
fixed costs, and the company can do nicely on a small part of the
business that no one pays attention to.
Billy and the Embalmer haven't been an interloper for a long long while and
it took a while for them to gain success... often due to the ineptitude of
their umm, collaborators and the competition.
So it's okay to be a bastard if you're big enough. I really find it
hard to believe that Bill Gates was ever anything more appealing than a
creepy little geek that people wouldn't have done business with if their
sense of niceness weren't so overwhelmed by their visions of wealth. As
to Steve Ballmer, I wonder how long he had to wait before he was given a
speaking role.
Rambus' ethics and goals are
a matter of record by even the judge who upheld their appeal against
Infineon.
And I have no doubt that whoever hears the current and any other
litigation will be hammered repeatedly with the judge's moralizing.
People who did everything they could to get into a top law school, then
did everything they could to get on law review, and then sucked up to
political hacks so they could get an appointment to the bench are
reliable moral arbiters now?
When the uhh "scrutinizer" is a bandit corp. run by and for shysters, whose
principal activity is confrontational litigation, it makes a difference
though.
If you live long enough, you should eventually discover that, as Henry
Miller put it, all corpses stink. That is, there are no saints whose
bodies would miraculously be preserved after death.
I have my own ethics and standards, like everyone. Even a terrorist or
a mobster has ethics and standards.
At some point, I decided I would live longer and somewhat more at peace
if I just accepted that no one really cares all that much about what my
ethics and standards are and that most public posturing about such
things is just that--posturing.
For the longest time, I wasted energy pointing out the obvious
discrepancies between what people said and what they did. I'm free now.
I've just given up--except when someone presses the issue. ;-).
I don't like lawyers any more than you do. If I didn't have so many
other things on my mind, I might spend some time looking into the
history of entrepreneurial predatory litigation. I suspect the tactic
is as old as guerilla warfare.
No, no that was more cynical than empathy for Intel but it would be sad for
the industry in general to have them besmirched publicly. Intel obviously
has an impressive technical pool... if only it can be applied usefully.
Besides, we might need them to compete with AMD.
Who knows. After a sufficient period of public ridicule and
humiliation, they might turn into the new IBM. ;-). Don't expect the
principals to turn into better people, though.
RM
