"Rebates and volume discounts are a standard practice for businesses."

Offering rebates only if they don't your competitors products most certainly is NOT standard business practice, and is quite illegal.

Intel justly already got burned for this in Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

@A Peon,

Hummm Maybe it is just you. AMD had a nice compeling tech at the time but no "real" way to make the volume Intel could. And much like it is today, the Intel brand is KING in the CPU world. Thats very important to consumers and the big computer mfg knew that. It would take more then a good tech and a few years to really take the market. Some Big Major Computer Makers were simply not willing to take that chance and invest lots of $'s to convert there mfg lines to include AMD arch at that time. And if they did, they kept the volumne small to reduce the risk of AMD bombing like the normally do. Also Intel would always match AMD price or at least come very close to keep its customers happy.

@A. Peon: AMD DID crack the market, big time. The problem is, they no longer have a superior product so it's back to purchases based on 'name recognition' for the unwashed masses.

I think it was more a stunt to see if they actually could give their stuff to Dell, but knew that Dell couldn't take them due to all the illegal crapola Intel does (pity we'll never really find out just how evil Intel was/is).

It got AMD 1.25 Billion from Intel, so it worked in the long run.

...AMD had the superior product at the time, so if they couldn't crack the market without giving it away free, just maaaybe someone was abusing a monopoly position?

Rebates and volume discounts are a standard practice for businesses. It will be interesting to see if the FTC goes after other firms offering rebates too.

According to their own disclosures, even AMD offered their parts for free to Dell at one point to leverage their position. Now THAT'S illegal. Selling below cost is not and should not be allowed.