Intel Corp (INTC)

[Golfbum]

up until 2000 i was at intel and much of the time in the sales force. like clockwork i, along with the rest of my peers in the sales and marketing world, were trained annually or more often on what we could and could not do legally. missing the legal training event was unlikely but if it happened you had to travel to the closest location where it was next being held. it was never optional. there's always the possibility that some bozo did something out of line but that doesn't make a pattern of conduct for the company which is liable.

there were occasionally people in my accounts who were upset that their "better" design was passed over by their manager who chose one which had more intel content. those designers were sometimes vocal in their opinions why their design was rejected. that didn't make them right, just vocal. telling them to ask their manager why their design was rejected wasn't my place but i often felt like it. i suspect situations like that is where some of today's inuendos come from.

the "intel inside" program was pretty simple and was separate from any volume pricing discounts. for each dollar the oem spent on qualifying intel cpus (not chipsets or other...) a few cents was put into a fund. this fund could only be used by the customer to supplement their qualifying ads for intel cpu based products. qualification depended on media (print, tv, radio, etc) and lack of competing products *in the ad.* note that the oem could spend as much as they wanted on ads for competing products and buy as much competing product that they wanted. but they only received reimbursements from their intel inside fund if the ad conformed to the "intel only" qualification. not really complicated at all.

gb