{"id":8416,"date":"2011-07-21T09:08:34","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T13:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=8416"},"modified":"2011-07-21T13:03:07","modified_gmt":"2011-07-21T17:03:07","slug":"its-hard-to-figure-what-i-like-about-oregon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=8416","title":{"rendered":"It’s hard to figure what I like about Oregon"},"content":{"rendered":"

No sales tax. That’s a good beginning. Friendly people who believe in “service.” That’s good. And the trees. They’re everywhere — big and gorgeous. They make een factories look charming. It’s cheap — but then any place is cheaper than the east coast, especially New York.<\/p>\n

The best thing might be the fact that it’s just a great place to start a new business.The place seems to be brimming with opportunities and plenty of money to fund everyone’s latest idea.<\/p>\n

It’s pleasant tootling around the Wilamette Valley, eating in small towns and eyeing the incredible vistas.<\/p>\n

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The wheat field is bright yellow. For some reason, the camera can’t capture the field’s awesome color.<\/p>\n

A little about Intel. <\/strong><\/span>My friends inside Intel tell me Intel’s success record on buying businesses and launching new products is\u00a0 3%.<\/strong> That means when Intel buys a new business, the chance of it not<\/strong> being around in 5 years is 97%<\/strong>. Ditto for new products INtel launches.<\/p>\n

Intel is abysmal compared to Apple.But its record is not uncommon for big technolcgy companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Motorola.<\/p>\n

Intel lives off one product — the x86 chip, and latest iterations. It’s the one that goes into Windows PCs and now Apple Macs.<\/p>\n

You somehow wish that Intel (and other big technology companies) would stop with their “diversification,” concentrate on their knitting and send their excess money back to their poor suffering shareholders. But it’s not to be. Management retains the fantasy that their next move will be the magic bullet that makes them the next Apple.<\/p>\n

There are many Steve Jobs out there. But he (or she) wouldn’t — in a year of Sundays — work for one of these monsters.<\/p>\n

I thought of all this when I read Intel’s press release this week on their latest miserable financials. Here are a couple of excerpts:<\/p>\n

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Harry Newton who loves the story of the Oregon wine business. Apparently 25 years ago, there were no vineyards in the Wilamette Valley. Now there are over 250 of them. The Valley now makes some of the best wines in the world, I’m told. (I don’t drink the stuff.) These guys give chutzpah a whole new meaning. Or maybe it’s just great marketing. You can visit these wineries for “tasting.” If you like the stuff, you can buy it. If you don’t buy it, they charge you up to $20 a visit person just\u00a0 to sip the samples. Apparently, that’s an American marketing invention.\u00a0 Wine tasting is free in France. … But what do I know? I’m the designated driver.<\/p>\n

We’re on our way back tonight, to “enjoy” the east’s heat. Here’s it’s 70.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No sales tax. That’s a good beginning. Friendly people who believe in “service.” That’s good. And the trees. They’re everywhere — big and gorgeous. They make een factories look charming. It’s cheap — but then any place is cheaper than the east coast, especially New York. The best thing might be the fact that it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}