Arnie Berman
Arnie Berman
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IBM was one of many companies that were good at managing expectations in a period where investors were conditioned to expect earnings surprises.
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IBM is one of these big bellwether companies where their business is so solid that in a year like 2001, where everybody was missing, IBM never missed a quarter.
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HP's problems with services are not uncommon. IBM has had issues like that, too, of late. The larger problem with tech today (Friday) and in the last month has been that improvement in semiconductor capital equipment, like Applied Materials, doesn't transfer over to the rest of the tech sector. While tech fundamentals are turning, the evidence of that has been slow coming.
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So far it looks good. It looks as though IBM is the company that has the right solutions set for some time now.
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In terms of the kind of hurdle that Microsoft and IBM have to leap over, the kind of growth they have to deliver is not as significant a bar as it is for Intel.
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The first quarter was so brutal for technology spending that even IBM missed the number and chose to lower the bar. But here you have an example of a company that's very big and whose results were not, in any respect, worse than expected.
concerns market rest
Techs are being impacted by the same concerns that the rest of the market is,
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Technology stocks were grossly oversold going into this. The recovery in fundamentals won't happen all at once, but it will get under way in the second quarter.
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Technology stocks that were once valued on a price-to-possibilities basis are now valued as if history no longer matters,
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At this point, boring makes for an interesting fourth quarter. I think this year's losers win. The stuff that people chucked from their portfolios is what they will want back.
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Consolidation activity is actually a signal that service providers are scared and will start spending money again. Equipment companies are long-term beneficiaries of this and frankly, I think that's what the bond market is smelling out,
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There's no unilateral belief about tech stocks. People are confused and somewhat justifiably.
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Linux promises to fulfill the promise made by Unix a decade ago -- a truly cheap, powerful and entirely open computing architecture. Sun is digging in its heels fighting the trend. As a result, no self-respecting CIO will say she or he wants to do more business with Sun.
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When stock prices are rising, companies have conviction about stability in the near-term and are more willing to take on the risk of acquiring something,