Intel Corp (INTC)

[Nitt]

re:"Intel strongarms Dell - brow beats them - threatens to cut them off - exercises monopoly control - and Dell rolls over."

Dell is not a market developer and Itanium was very much in the market development phase a few months ago. In addition, IBM and HP had chipset support, while Dell needed to wait for Intel. Dell never sells paper, they sell system and they sell them more agressivly than the other guy... especially companies like HP and IBM. They are still probably entering a bit earlier then they would like, but this is a very good sign for Intel.

Regarding Opteron; like I said, Dell is not a market developer and Opteron needs a hell of a lot of market development to take place before it would make sence for Dell's business model. I'm sure Dell used the threat of AMD to make sure that they got the best deal possible for Itanium. HP probably has a built in advantage since it was a joint design, and Dell was probably very concered about that.

Nitt