Dell Received $6B Through Secret Intel Pact

[GaiaHunter]

I just don't think it's fair to think AMD is a bunch of good guys just because they have a smaller market share than Intel. Sure they are the under dogs, but since when is the favorite automatically a bad person and the under dog a good one? Knowing how competitive the cpu market is, I can see AMD doing the same thing. And we now know that AMD's CEO at the time doesn't have strong ethics anyway. He insider traded which is much easier than paying oems to not stock competitors products.

That is true, but if both contenders are about the same size and have similar power, it is a lot harder to pull dirty tactics. At similar sizes, both sides, even if individually dishonest, would keep each other honest even if only by effects of canceling each others moves.

Look at what happened to the GTX280/260 price with 4800 series. Athlon 64 should have done something similar to the price of P4. Why would anyone be paying $1000 for a P4 EE when an AMD FX was similar price? How could Intel sell those processors at those prices?

Yeah, Intel has a bigger production capacity, but still that doesn't explain everything.

Intel claims that the consumer benefited of cheaper prices, but imagine how lower they could have been if, and this is considering Intel did use anti-competitive tactics, Intel CPUs had to compete in an even field with AMD CPUs at OEM? We will never know...

I think the honor, honesty, values, etc, while important, are irrelevant in this situation, for the consumers.

 

[formulav8]

Even though I am a Intel stock holder, I for one hope Intel get fried to a crisp if they are found guilty. I care, and have always cared about people in general much more than the pathetic little dollar.

 

[bradley]

The NY AG's lawsuit was borne from the initial 2006 SEC investigation, which made DELL's accounting public. In 2007, DELL shareholders sued based on these findings with claims over illegal accounting and kickbacks from Intel. An internal audit eventually reveals as much as $350M in overstated sales and $100M in profit from 2003 to 2007.

Dell settled the shareholder suit last month, while the SEC probe itself is obviously still on-going. As part of the settlement, DELL has implemented an accounting code of ethics and a provision for anonymous employee complaints. So these lawsuits basically piggyback and broaden the initial SEC investigation going back to 2003.

 

[wwswimming]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=INTC dell

why isn't the financial media reporting more on this ? sounds like pretty big news.

 

[GoPackGo]

So if this is a problem, why can't I get a Pepsi at McDonalds? Why do sports stadiums sign exclusive contracts with beer companies? It's the same thing.

 

[Idontcare]

So if this is a problem, why can't I get a Pepsi at McDonalds? Why do sports stadiums sign exclusive contracts with beer companies? It's the same thing.

From post above in this thread:

Somebody here can correct me if I am wrong but I think the crux of the issue isn't whether or not Company A doing Activity B is illegal or anti-competitive (think about it, all marketing campaigns and advertisements are anti-competitive, so too is pricing)...but rather the issue is whether Company A has attained significant girth in their respective markets such that their doing Activity B suddenly becomes the tail wagging the dog in that marketspace.

An anology...stock trading and market manipulation. By definition every stock transaction you or I make, be it to buy stock or sell it, has the cause-and-effect of manipulating the price of that stock. But when we buy and sell stock it isn't considered price manipulation because the relative magnitude of our ability to influence price is quite limited owing to our own limited resources relative to the scale of the market itself. But if we were Bill Gates and we were throwing around billions of dollars at small-cap stocks in which we were buying and selling appreciable fractions of the float then our impact on the price would be viewed as unacceptable by governing bodies and we'd be regulated as price manipulators.

So as I see it this isn't a case where Intel has done something illegal in that other company's can do it and get away with it or that it just needs to be "spun" as an investment/incentive program with different nouns and adjectives employed in the boilerplate. Rather I see the issue here as being one of "is Intel so large that their activities, regardless the legality of them, invokes Anti-Trust regulations and anti-competitive reactions?".

Once you cross that threshold as a business where the government looks at you and concludes "you know AT&T, errr we mean Intel, even if you were to toe the line and do absolutely nothing in terms of diminishing competition you are just so damned big at this point that we simply have no choice but to bust you up and hope it resparks competitive activity in your market-space."

 

[Viditor]

So if this is a problem, why can't I get a Pepsi at McDonalds? Why do sports stadiums sign exclusive contracts with beer companies? It's the same thing.

Because contrary to what many think, a monopoly isn't having all of the market share, it's having dominant market share. Both Intel and Microsoft are monopolies...which isn't ilegal BTW.
The problem is when a monopoly uses it's market position to exclude others in the market place. That is deemed illegal under the Anti-trust laws. So because Pepsi is of ~equal size, Coke is not a monopoly and can sign that contract.