Hello P, <On the street it seemed that 2-5% were on the phone. And everyone carried a cell phone. > I see you recently joined SI. Welcome and may your stay be a happy one. It's a weird world in SI sociologically. Not the same as in 3D at all.
Everyone will ignore you. Don't take offence at anything. It's very easy to misinterpret things in SI. People write on the fly and most have the frustration of other people [or themselves] getting the wrong end of the stick. Also, everyone is probing in the dark. That's because people don't really have any idea what the hell is going on with anything, even if they follow just one thing and are the supreme expert.
Here's a little example. A year ago, the infrastructure division was about to move to profit. The handset division early this year was proudly about to launch the ThinPhone and pdQ to world acclaim. Next thing you know, L M Ericsson has bought the infrastructure division which was going down the gurgler. The handset division can't get parts but is selling the ThinPhone at low margins even though there are not enough available so it goes on the block too.
One minute, China is about to roll out cdmaOne. The next, Zhu Rongji is sent packing by Clinton and the Republicans who then bomb the Chinese embassy as a parting gift. These people are the best and brightest who are running the outfit. Not yet satisfied, they attack Microsoft which has single handedly brought cheap communications and powerful computing to hundreds of millions of people and accelerated The New Paradigm immeasurably. Yes, immeasurably - I don't believe anyone has any idea how dramatic will be the effects. Only in the past month or so has The Fed accepted that maybe something is going on in productivity and economic acceleration and the performance is NOT just a tulip mania bubble to end in tears and disaster.
We really have no idea what's going on.
This time a year ago, I was sure the OPEC crowd would not be able to hold things together and oil prices would collapse as Saudi Arabia went for cash flow through production increases. NOPE! They held together, cut production and now oil is at $23 per barrel, two and a half times the low in December98.
That should, to me, have already caused a crunch in the oil consuming world and stocks which depend on oil [nearly all of them] should have declined heavily. NOPE! The New Paradigm didn't blink an eye and stock prices and profits just roared on ahead [though not so much in the Dow world].
Nobody in SI has a clue. Well, they do, but some really puff themselves up and seriously pretend they definitely know what markets [the mob] will do. Some are of course better than others, but all of us have 99.9% knowledge gaps and 99.9% understanding deficits. We operate on very little information and are not good at processing what we do have, especially since half the information we have is actually incorrect. But if we can reduce our ignorance from 99.9% to 99.7%, I figure we treble our chances of doing the right thing.
This isn't a lecture to you in person [I don't know anything about you - it's just for general readership]. I just like to rant.
What I was really going to ask, was did you count those cellphone users in Tokyo to get your 2% to 5%? Did you count lots of 100? How many lots of 100 did you count? Was it a working day and what time? Lunchtime?
I'm going to go sit in Newmarket and have a coffee and count people walking down the street and see how many are on the phone. That's an easy count and gets good data.
You said everyone carried a phone. I guess you mean 50% or maybe they just seemed to be everywhere? Many would have phones in bags so you couldn't see. Or pockets.
I'm not being picky here. I think this is good information and is a guide to what will happen elsewhere as cellphones get cheaper and calling party pays.
Mqurice |
