Mannerisms

“The share price has fallen by a third in three months.Goldman Sachs has knocked us off its conviction buy list. Lousy NAND prices have knocked a couple of points off our gross margin forecast. Toshiba is spending a trillion yen on NAND fab, and there’s a Goldman analyst saying we’ve got to ‘better articulate the reason behind our position in NAND before investors feel comfortable buying the stock’. So what do we do?”

"Why not sue everyone else in the NAND business for infringing our patents and hound them out of the NAND business?"

"We can't because Toshiba holds the fundamental NAND flash patents".

“Then why not get out of the NAND business?”

“We can’t. We’re still trying to get out of the NOR business, and a couple years back we got out of wireless, and everyone’s saying we can’t hack it in markets where we don’t have a monopoly.”

“Who cares what everyone thinks?”

“Right, but then we get accused of arrogance”.

“Why not introduce a ten core Pentium and tell customers they can only have it if they buy nothing from AMD?”

“Then those shitty Europeans will accuse us of abusing a dominant market position.”

“Why not introduce a 16Gig phase change memory”.

“We can’t. The densest we can do is 128Meg”.

“Why not move the fabs to 32nm?”

“We can’t. There aren’t any 32nm production tools.”

“Oh shit”.

“Yeah, it's shit”.