John, Don't Worry, Be Happy sounds good, but slippage to the right is NOT good. It reduces both short and long term prospects for success. Failing short term is not desirable in any sense. If some VP in a tree company gets turned down by his board, then maybe they'll take a closer look when he says, "But if we are in the first 10,000 we get free minutes for a year". If they are too dumb to take up the offer, somebody else won't be. Not all tree company executives can be made of wood from the neck up.
If they can't discriminate between Iridium and Globalstar, they are probably not even in business. [Well, assuming Globalstar stops copying Iridium and starts selling minutes and handsets as they should].
Some chasms don't get crossed. Just because it's a mess doesn't mean it's just another good old chasm to cross. It might be a death dealing hole as Iridium found. Probably they had people in the company saying, "Cool, we are now crossing the chasm", some 6 months ago. No they weren't. They were sliding to the right and falling downwards to their doom.
We are not seeing minimized short term risk. We are seeing dramatically increased short term AND long term risk and definite reduction in total return on investment.
Maurice
PS: Sure Limtex, Vodafone is behind Globalstar 100%. They are a shareholder and have service provider rights in several countries, for example Australia, where they should be in operation before too long. I suppose Airtouch/Vodafone will both use the high-priced, low volume approach to selling Globalstar minutes to minimize their profit and Globalstar's. |
