The back half of the year looks like it will be better than expected.

Dell reaffirmed their guidance for the third quarter, but gave no guidance going forward. They also said that industry growth for the third quarter was going to be worse than expected.

Intel sees no signs of a pickup and would not call this quarter the bottom for revenues. We do not think the bottom will be reached until the summer, at the earliest, and remain cautious on the stock.

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.

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.

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.