The great leveling

IBM has created a graphic showing the various Itanium sales forecasts over
the years, where every subsequent sales forecast shrinks lower and lower,
which can be called the "Great Leveling".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09..._idc_mistakes/

Original IBM presentation:

http://202.113.29.200/Seminar/Sen-Ming%20Chang1.pdf

Yousuf Khan

--
Humans: contact me at ykhan at rogers dot com
Spambots: just reply to this email address ;-)

Yousuf Khan wrote:
IBM has created a graphic showing the various Itanium sales forecasts over
the years, where every subsequent sales forecast shrinks lower and lower,
which can be called the "Great Leveling".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09..._idc_mistakes/

Original IBM presentation:

http://202.113.29.200/Seminar/Sen-Ming%20Chang1.pdf

Yousuf Khan


Except this presentation doesn't reflect what intel said about Itanium,
it is what "analysts" at IDC printed. All it tells me is that IDC
hasn't done its homework researching market factors around Itanium and
is just throwing out numbers. The numbers always looked rediculous to
me. I'm not even sure there is that much money ($30B) to be had from
server sales, as predicted by IDC to be gained in a single year.
Especially as intel promisses price equity with x86 by 2007.

Alex
--
My words are my own. They represent no other; they belong to no other.
Don't read anything into them or you may be required to compensate me
for violation of copyright. (I do not speak for my employer.)

Alex Johnson wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:

IBM has created a graphic showing the various Itanium sales forecasts
over the years, where every subsequent sales forecast shrinks lower
and lower, which can be called the "Great Leveling".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09..._idc_mistakes/

Original IBM presentation:

http://202.113.29.200/Seminar/Sen-Ming%20Chang1.pdf



Except this presentation doesn't reflect what intel said about Itanium,
it is what "analysts" at IDC printed. All it tells me is that IDC
hasn't done its homework researching market factors around Itanium and
is just throwing out numbers. The numbers always looked rediculous to
me. I'm not even sure there is that much money ($30B) to be had from
server sales, as predicted by IDC to be gained in a single year.
Especially as intel promisses price equity with x86 by 2007.


Vantage point is everything. IBM's Power is a really neat chip, but if
IBM wants it to be anything more than a loss leader, it needs to be rid
of Itanium as a serious threat. It's actually a losing battle, I
suspect. Even if Itanium really does disappear, Intel will simply shift
its focus to endowing x86 with the enterprise-ready features it needs to
compete at the high end.

As to analysts, the sales forecasts having been so useless in the past,
why would anyone take to believing them now?

RM

Alex Johnson wrote:
Except this presentation doesn't reflect what intel said about
Itanium, it is what "analysts" at IDC printed. All it tells me is
that IDC hasn't done its homework researching market factors around
Itanium and is just throwing out numbers. The numbers always looked
rediculous to me. I'm not even sure there is that much money ($30B)
to be had from server sales, as predicted by IDC to be gained in a
single year. Especially as intel promisses price equity with x86 by
2007.

There was an interesting quote in there about IDC. IDC's forecasted numbers
missed by about 96% of the actual numbers. It can be said that a monkey
throwing feces at a sales chart should be able to get to within 90% of the
actual numbers. :-)

Yousuf Khan

Robert Myers wrote:
As to analysts, the sales forecasts having been so useless in the
past, why would anyone take to believing them now?

Comedic relief?

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Robert Myers wrote:

As to analysts, the sales forecasts having been so useless in the
past, why would anyone take to believing them now?


Comedic relief?


[dropped comp.sys.intel so I don't get pulled over by the OT police]

I think analyst's estimates are a form of intellectual reinsurance
("Well, of course it's BS, but what else do you want me to rely on--my
own BS? My dart board?").

What do _you_ think Yousuf? Will Itanium die while Power and Sparc
survive? All three chips look more like expensive hobbies than
realistic business propositions (and a dart board looks really
attractive for predicting the future of that market segment).

RM

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 08:25:02 -0400, Alex Johnson
wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:
IBM has created a graphic showing the various Itanium sales forecasts over
the years, where every subsequent sales forecast shrinks lower and lower,
which can be called the "Great Leveling".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09..._idc_mistakes/

Original IBM presentation:

http://202.113.29.200/Seminar/Sen-Ming%20Chang1.pdf

Yousuf Khan


Except this presentation doesn't reflect what intel said about Itanium,
it is what "analysts" at IDC printed. All it tells me is that IDC
hasn't done its homework researching market factors around Itanium and
is just throwing out numbers. The numbers always looked rediculous to
me. I'm not even sure there is that much money ($30B) to be had from
server sales, as predicted by IDC to be gained in a single year.
Especially as intel promisses price equity with x86 by 2007.

Just as a FWIW, this year there will probably be somewhere on the
order of $50B (+/- $5B) in total worldwide server sales.

If Itanium had reached it's original "one chip to rule them all" goal,
it might well have managed $30B in server sales for this year. Still,
I think you're right that the sales forecasts where always a shot in
the dark at best.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

Robert Myers wrote:
What do _you_ think Yousuf? Will Itanium die while Power and Sparc
survive? All three chips look more like expensive hobbies than
realistic business propositions (and a dart board looks really
attractive for predicting the future of that market segment).

Well, Power and Sparc both have large existing software bases, so whether
they are hobby chips or not, at least they are useful hobby chips.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Robert Myers wrote:

What do _you_ think Yousuf? Will Itanium die while Power and Sparc
survive? All three chips look more like expensive hobbies than
realistic business propositions (and a dart board looks really
attractive for predicting the future of that market segment).


Well, Power and Sparc both have large existing software bases, so whether
they are hobby chips or not, at least they are useful hobby chips.


I don't know how much the installed software base really has to do with
what's left of the target markets. IBM wants to protect its juicy slice
at the high end and others would like to grab a slice of it. I don't
_think_ x86 is plausible for that slot unless Intel decides it's going
to try to make it plausible (and, at that, I think it won't be easy).
So the question is, what chip(s) will play in that market, say, five
years from now.

Power is a nice chip, but it's a money-loser for IBM. Whether Power
goes or stays depends entirely on how critical IBM thinks it is to
protecting its high-end franchise.

Sparc's hold on life seems even more tenuous. You'll tell me why I'm
being silly for saying so, I'm sure, but I don't understand why Sun
doesn't see Solaris on Itanium as at least as attractive as its
capitulation to Microsoft.

That leaves Itanium, heavy baggage and all. Intel knows how to make
lots of chips cheap (or at least it did at one time). The story of the
industry for the last two decades has been lots of chips cheap. The
Sparc/Power market is the last holdout.

RM

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:10:12 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Robert Myers wrote:

As to analysts, the sales forecasts having been so useless in the
past, why would anyone take to believing them now?


Comedic relief?


[dropped comp.sys.intel so I don't get pulled over by the OT police]

I think analyst's estimates are a form of intellectual reinsurance
("Well, of course it's BS, but what else do you want me to rely on--my
own BS? My dart board?").

Who is that talking in quotes though?:-)... the corporate system buyer?...
the stock speculator?... the system mfr? Intel has certainly gotten a lot
of mileage, PR-wise out of the wild forecasts by analysts... and there's
never a day of final reckoning where facts have to be faced down and denied
or accepted. Nobody ever says: "**** IDC - they're useless... ignore
them". Conspiracy?... err, I hope not!

What do _you_ think Yousuf? Will Itanium die while Power and Sparc
survive? All three chips look more like expensive hobbies than
realistic business propositions (and a dart board looks really
attractive for predicting the future of that market segment).

Without inside knowledge it's hard to be sure but IBM has tremendous depth
and scope for using their designs across a range of internal developments
as well as selling merchant chips in several derivative forms...
sustainable?... I dunno... but I think I have at least as good an idea as
any err, analyst. When something like Alpha can turn rotten, anything can
happen. So will we end up with just x86-64 and ARM as *the* computer
architectures to choose from? What will the Chinese do?... do they
matter?shrug

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??