This kind of thing really pushes my buttons...

Article title: Dell investors allege secret kickbacks by Intel
Author: Ben Ames (computerworld.com)

For those of you who haven't heard, Mike Dell is back in control of his company! hoo-RAY for all -consumers and investors alike. I believe this man has what it takes to turn Dell around and take back the market share that has been lost to HP, IBM, and even Apple.

This article talks about investors forming a class action lawsuit against Dell for inflating their profits with under-the-table gifts from Intel. Execs at Dell and Intel apparently had a deal going to keep Dell exclusively with Intel. Well now that Dell has been selling AMD processors for over 6 months, I guess the cat is out of the bag. And the snake (former CEO Kevin Rollins) is out of Dell...but that's not enough for me. As an investor in both of these companies, I want to see them go after the people at Intel too. This was done dirty, and everyone involved should be held responsible. I know in the short run if this comes down I personally am going to lose more money than I already have...But...damnit, in the long run I want justice and I want the liars out. Really, this deal wouldn't have been that bad had it been done upfront. Dell and Intel should have drawn up a small contract stating Dell would exclusively deal with Intel processors if Intel paid a rebate at the end of each year. This money could have been exchanged legally and been figured properly into the accounting. No, instead it was tacked on to Dell's profits. WrONG!

What REALLY gets is that this means that Intel's profit has been artificially low as well. So while this could have been done honestly, i've been losing money in a bull market on two high profile companies...so let me shout out a big "F YOU!" to all those greedy, sneaky execs out there that don't care if they screw people over and cause the market to be artificially volitile...

When Dell gets turned around, so will the chipmaker sector. Intel is just waiting to return to high profitablilty. It's deals with Apple, IBM and Sun have the potential to grow. AMD has clearly taken a hit on profitability by dealing with Dell as they have been forced to produce cheaper. AMD needs to operate efficiently enough to offer a solid entry level processor to keep up with supplying Dell, this will come. More importantly though, they need to return to their old mantra that says offer something comprable (equal or better) to Intel but at a lower price point. It seems with its latest dual core server and desktop processors AMD has suffered because they completely lost the price and power consumption war on high-end processors by trying to win the performance war. This failed because in the end, Intel is bigger and operates more efficiently.