

The Dell Bombshell (76% earnings in Q107 from INTL payments) - bretpiatt
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/07/the-dell-tale-starts-to-unravel-and-its-a-bombshell.html

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simon_
Why do you say "INTL" in the headline? It's only one letter shorter than the
complete name of the company and the stock ticker (if that's what you were
going for) is INTC.

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jacquesm
Reading this you'd think there is only one guilty party here, but in fact,
there are two, and it is strange that Intel seems to get away without so much
as a pointed finger. . Did the SEC go after the Intel big shots too ? How come
AMD doesn't get a slice of that fine, after all, it seems they're the wronged
party here, not the SEC.

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wmf
Didn't Intel already pay AMD something like _one billion dollars_ to settle
this?

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jacquesm
Well, if that's the same thing then this is hardly news, the way it is
presented here is as if this wasn't known until now.

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martincmartin
Intel's payments were known, but not their effect on Dell's financials. The
fact that Dell used them as a cookie jar is new.

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jacquesm
Weird, you'd say that if the amounts were public knowledge that it would be
easy to figure out the effect on Dells bottom line.

What bothers me about cases like this is that apparently successful companies
will go to any length to maintain their stockprice when things are not-so-good
for a relatively short period of time. A supplier _paying_ for the privilege
of using their product in order to harm a competitor should have been enough
of a red-flag for anybody at Dell to stay miles away from it, after all,
enough people knew about this that it would never be kept secret for ever (and
the amounts are too large for that anyway).

The punishment for this kind of trickery should not just be a fine, it should
be jail time for the execs involved.

There are 'free market extremists' that believe that the government should
stay out of stuff like this, but just like in a regular game you need a
referee the world of business unfortunately needs institutions like the SEC to
govern the world of business.

The only reason they're getting involved here is because of the effect on the
stock price, if Dell wasn't a public company this would not have raised an
eyebrow.

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Maro
Why did Dell give up on the Intel payments by offering AMD chips if those
payments made up 75% of their income?

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CamperBob
The situation would be analogous to a meth addict who manages to kick the
habit right before it kills him, I think.

I've lost a lot of respect for Michael over this news. He was taking the
baksheesh from Intel at exactly the same time he was recommending that Apple
be wound up and liquidated for lack of a viable business model. That took
chutzpah he could have put to better use elsewhere in his own business.

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snom370
I think he said that in 1997, not 2007. But if he had not done this deal,
Steve Jobs would have been able to send his "well look at that, we're bigger
than Dell" mail sooner.

