Strategic question for the G&K crowd. LHSP has made much out of shifting its mix towards applications sales rather than technology licensing. Clearly this is what drove the Dictaphone deal, to get the salesforce, installed base, and particularly the health care vertical.
I suppose it is possible from reading Moore that your various simian friends can be found in both the customer applications and enabling technology jungles.
Seems to me that unless one is of the size of a CSCO, MSFT, ORCL, etc. it is quite rare one company achieves silverback status in both jungles. QCOM is a recent example of a company that experienced this difficulty and decided to focus on the enabling technology jungle. Giant INTC more or less made the same decision years ago.
So my question, in G&K terms, is if "speech understanding" is perhaps only in the bowling alley right now, and one supposedly employs 2,000 speech engineers, linguists, and scientists, does one deploy these resources in the holy grail quest of developing a patented proprietary true "speech understanding" (not voice recognition) engine, or do we send most of them off to the Seoul stock exchange to implement oral stock quotes and the medical records department of Holy Mother Hospital to automate transcription?
While I've framed that as a rhetorical question, could one infer that perhaps the holy grail ain't anywhere near around the corner, er chasm, and in the interim VR applications are the best way to pay the bills? |
