You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.
— Kevin Rollins
Well, you would have to say what is the criteria to determine the success of any merger? It would have to be that the companies are stronger financially, that they took market share, and they are on a very steady footing in terms of their performance.
We are No. 1 worldwide by quite a margin on the client side and expanding, according to IDC and others, every single quarter. Our expectation is that the industry will consolidate and that more of our competitors will exit.
So when we go into a large hardware bid, there is usually a services component that is part of that. So as we enter these deals, we tend to talk about the capabilities and what else needs to be done, and from there the bid might expand beyond hardware to the services.
Most of the services staff is for the larger corporations, not so much for small and medium businesses because they cannot afford an extensive services army.
I'm the one who made many of the bold comments that we'd seen the technologies from AMD as pretty good. Their technology in many areas was leading. But those are transient.
I am sure there will come a time when we are going to use AMD. The products have been getting better. The acceptance is getting better. But we have not been suffering as a company for either growth or profitability because we haven't had AMD.
And our size: The company this year is going to be close to $50 billion, so if that's the case and you can continue to grow that fast, I would rather put my energies to solving customer problems and growing our business than worrying about integrating and laying people off.
When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman - a rage, everyone had to have one. Well, you don't hear about the Walkman anymore.
We think we have a responsibility. And I think it's important for all of us in the Western world to realize that we've all been blessed a lot and if you go to these parts they don't have a lot, even before the tsunami.
There would not be enough talent that's educated, developed and ready to take on the next leadership challenge, and it would cap our growth. Now we've put programs in place not to have that happen, but that could be a weakness.
Over the last several quarters we have been growing faster in Asia and Europe than any other place on the planet. We have 18 percent of the global PC share, about 12 percent in Europe, and 8 percent in Asia.
It might take some here and there, but Apple's market share in the global computer business has really shrunk pretty far, and where they've been making success recently is not in the computer business but in the iPod music business.
I think right now the jury is out on where and how much profit is available in the consumer electronics industry, because if you look at the current consumer electronics players, the biggest ones on the planet struggle to make profit consistently.
Everyone wants to talk about it, and right now music, flat-panel televisions, a whole host of new handheld devices are fun to talk about and very exciting to look at.
What we learned several years ago was that one of our weaknesses would be if we didn't develop enough people with the know-how to run our company, it would come to the point where we would just stop.
We own 18 percent of just the PC business. Now that's only about 60 percent of our business today.
The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.
Our goal is to leverage what is already out in the field in terms of partners, but then hire in project management capability and a bit of technical capability.
Intel's still our main partner. We have not announced anything with AMD and don't have anything planned, but we're constantly being aware to make sure our customers get the best technology.
I believe that one-product wonders come and go.
Consumer electronics is a challenging one.
