hi Amy
lucent's release answers some of your questions:
lucent-optical.com
as i understand it, the router will be deployed in the backbone.
"45 billion harder to grow than 12 ...". yeah, the "law" of large numbers. depends what you're growing. this is not cars, it's inventions, patents, contacts, contracts, experience, speed from lab to market. lucent has over 2,000 patents in optics alone. i just finished reading "The Code Book", in my field. near the end of the book we come to quantum computers. say you want to find a number whose square and cube together use all the digits from one to zero, once and only once. the quantum computer will give you that in one second. it's 'way out in the future. lotsa problems to solve. but 2 guys, Peter Shor and Lov Grover are the first to devise useful quantum computer programs, both at Lucent's Bell Labs. to check a million keys a second a conventional computer'd take over 1,000 years. Grover's program'll do it in 4 minutes. and they've got a patent on it.
my point is lucent has, i dunno, thousands of arrows in their quiver. each one bracketed with many patents. if they don't deploy the product, they'll get royalties, which go straight to the bottom line virtually costless. like qualcomm's cdma royalties - but multiplied by hundreds if not thousands of products. Q has essentially one arrow in its quiver: cdma and its offshoots like hdr. some bright people on the Q threads say cdma won't replace gsm/tdma, but will coexist with them. Q's a super outfit, more to come from them for sure. they're 150 times next year's earnings and lu is 41 times next year's. Q's up 1000% this year and lu is up 42%. matter of proportion.
back to mundane things like contacts and contracts and present and near-future earnings. lu has installed over 5,000 systems, 29% of the market. no big installation will be begun without asking lucent to bid. lucent's only competitor (in optics) is nortel, another ripsnorter, but lucent says they lead nortel in 8 of 9 optics categories. nortel says lucent leads in only 7 of the 9. but nortel isn't into quantum computers.
this startup ariel, shot up from $3.56 to 57 this week, makes a modem card. Times says their competition is csco and lucent.
every time i check out a tech company turns out lucent is either the leader, the top competition, or a player. they're in cdma, too.
overall lucent has no competition.
think of the research and development money lucent has available out of $45 billion in revenues.
i like the safety of betting on a guy that has his chips placed on almost every number on the table and is 6-foot 6 and weighs 250 lbs. |
