09/12/00 Sold Short *MYTN 7 3/8
09/14/00 Bought/Cover *MYTN 7 3/16
Me so piker. There were some honkin' big buy orders at 7 or a little below on the 14th so I unloaded. Squeeze today of what I think was massive short interest -- or some shorts just got bored and covered. But never underestimate the power of a large group of MYTN fans.
Your question, of course, is: Should we short this dog at the gap ups? Out of my league, but I do offer...
...The bigger picture:
The GlobalPC's ace card is its operating system, GEOS. From Slashdot:
slashdot.org
QNX? Um, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
by dbirchall on Friday August 18, @09:55PM EDT (#4)
(User #191839 Info) epinions.scream.org
The Global PC runs GEOS.
Those of us who're old enough may remember GEOS on the C-64, C-128 and Apple II from Berkeley Softworks, back in the '80s. BSW became GeoWorks around 1990, and sold the OS and app suites based on it for a few years, as well as selling it for PDA's like the Tandy/Casio/Sharp "Zoomer" and some HP OmniGo models.
Around the mid-'90s, GeoWorks focused more on smart phones (the Nokia 9000 family of smart phones run GEOS), and desktop stuff was taken over by New Deal, Inc..
On the x86 platform, GEOS offered pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, and object-oriented design (coded in something resembling Objective C, if I recall from the days when I had the SDK and developer docs, and in assembler) - and it did this a full five years ahead of Windows 95. In 1990, it had shared UI code for all apps, like GNOME and KDE are now doing.
It was also very fast as a platform - it was originally designed to run on an 8086 with 640K, and even the most recent versions are quite happy on a '286 with a meg or two. On anything "recent" in the way of a CPU, it should outperform just about anything - unless, of course, it's loading stuff over a dialup...
The fact that it can use a 486 instead of a modern CPU is a plus. The fact that it can't be upgraded is a plus. Would you buy a toaster with expansion card slots and a 60-second boot-up lag? Despite Knows-Picker's and Deeber's analyses, rock-solid simplicity over bleeding-edge performance is what netpliance consumers want. It does seem to be overpriced at $300, though. I would say it's worth about $20 -- but a wide profit-margin never hurts.
MYTN has nothing on the Xbox and i-opener (NPLI) except the world's best netpliance operating system. The competition counters with raw horsepower which is cheap and getting cheaper by the day. What there is of a netpliance market is going to be soaked up by cheap, mass-produced, high-powered console gaming devices that will have web-browsing and e-mail capabilities. Bottom line: No one will remember the GlobalPC three years from now.
(Speaking of NPLI, it's trading at a lofty 2 1/2 today, down form 20+ at its IPO 18 months ago and soon to be $1.)
But, then again, there is the Brazil factor...
-CL |
