Dan Niles People Quotations

The magnitude of the problem is what caught most people off guard.

Slightly, to my mind, implies 3- to 5-percent growth. I think most people were looking at the 7- to 8-percent range for the fourth quarter.

Our stance has been in big enterprise applications, it was obvious that people were buying ahead to get their systems ready for Y2K. The mainframe business is a dying business, and our feeling was IBM would see it in the third and fourth quarters because the growth patterns weren't normal.

I'm surprised it was this good, quite honestly. And more importantly the guidance for next year on the gross margin line of 57 percent. I think people are going to be very encouraged given that's up pretty substantially from what they did this last year.

We're getting to the latter half of the year. and typically, the industry sells close to 20 percent more PCs in the second half versus the first half. People are getting ready in anticipation of a much stronger second half of the year.