I brought your comments over here Tero so the Nokians don't moan about thread pollution: <As far as Globalstar is concerned - deep in your black little heart you know the truth, Maurice. The piece I wrote in July claimed that:
- Ericsson is badly late with their handsets
- Even US service won't start anywhere near the promised launch date
- the price of the handset will be around 1'500 dollars; wildly above the 700 dollar retail price mooted by many commentators in June
- per minute costs will be far higher than the 70 cent figure widely cited in many articles
- GSM worldphone models will be shortly available
Guess what? It happened. Globalstar is late; it's expensive; it's far, far short of the "40 000 subs by the end of 1999" projection. Motorola's Timeport offering GSM 900/1900 coverage is one of Europe's most hyped phone models this month.
What nobody could foresee is that despite all this, GSTRF can retain its ability to screw investors coming and going. They can miss all the targets that mattered in July - and people are still willing to clap their hands to keep Tinker Bell alive.
This ties up to the market psychology - the general unwillingness of tech investors to confront the concept of risk. I'm not into auguring Wall Street's psychopathology. Sooner or later the reality will dawn on even the most solipsistic Pollyannas.
We will get some actual numbers on Globalstar's monthly billing soon enough. Let's see whether the Wall Street can hold on to its happy thoughts then. It should be 160 minutes per month at 1.50 dollars per minute, right? And about 500 000 subs by year's end? Hold that thought.>
So, were you a short seller? Bad luck if you were! Right now, the Nasdaq is showing people that even in Y2K, The New Millennium and The New Paradigm, Paradigm Shift Happens. Markets do NOT always go up. We'll know how many people will catch a falling knife, maybe tomorrow. A lot of wild and newly-acquainted-with-margin novices will learn about margin calls and the rapid escalation of debt in a falling market. A LOT of Paradigm Shift might happen in a short time.
You see the Globalstar thread as full of Pollyanish "The Matrix" types, who have created an imaginary world, joyfully spreading The Word about how great Globalstar is while warring against dark forces from another dimension. Some kind of cyberspace crazy-zone where pixels separate from reality then lodge in our heads in some weird self-creating madness, with all this orchestrated by the ruler of The Globalstar Truman Show [to continue the movie analogy] in the form of the great international soldering-spymaster, Bernard Schwartz.
Heck, I see what you mean. This solipsism stuff is FUN!
But dreams have already created reality. There really is an objective constellation of satellites up there which works as designed. The reality of Globalstar is pretty much now out of the abstract and into the material world.
How do you know it is not YOU who is in The Matrix and YOUR reality is not distorted through your own misinterpretation of what you see. True enough, there were delays of a relatively minor nature, though frustrating. Service Providers have delayed start of service until the satellites are actually nearly all in position, which is understandable in some ways. But you should not leverage a few deficiencies into a total failure plan. Even Cindy Crawford has a mole on her lip, which I dare say was there at the beginning, but did not prevent the rest of her beautiful development.
Looking for reasons why your conclusion is right is very risky. Your conclusion is that Globalstar is no good. Now you seem to work your way back, like a science student [or mouse-painting biologist], filling in the gaps, even with fake data, to ensure the 'right answer' is obtained. That is SERIOUS self-deception. VERY risky for financial well-being.
I bet you are grateful for a science lecture!
There wasn't a 70c plan - I'd have liked that, but never saw it. I've always been under the impression we'd be at $1.50 [see the first thread in 1996]. Handsets were always going to be over $1000 initially. If demand is high, then of course they sell at what the market will bear. I doubt many are surprised that Ericy is late with handsets. Globalstar tried to get service providers to sell minutes from a half-complete constellation [they were planning that back in July, moving satellites all over the place to maximize coverage], but the service providers wouldn't take it on, so of course the October launch was not met.
The subscriber response is, as you say, the thought to hold. 160 minutes per handset per month at $1.50 with nearly half a million sold. The first two figures will be evident VERY soon. As early as March. The third figure's success or failure will be obvious by April.
Then we'll know who to unplug from their life-support machine.
Maurice
PS: To bore you a little more, while we should look for reasons why we are right, it is even more important to look for reasons why we are wrong. That's the key to success and the key to science - good old Popperian Falsifiability.
Jon is looking for a failure mode in his theory of how great Globalstar is. For example, if he turns it on and it catches fire, I bet he is hitting the sell button. He won't look for why it's good [though he will of course check
that it is good], but rather why it's bad. If he can find enough bad, he'll run for the hills.
This is the opposite of Pollyanna. It is also not solipsism - he's confirming objective facts about the system. You get the real oil in this thread and make a LOT of money too. |
