When I look down the list of 11 ponds, 3 stand out as not having particularly significant royalties (at least to me).
1. Wireless Hand-held Internet Devices.
2. Consumer Internet Appliances.
3. IP Phones.
The 3 ponds mentioned above tend to be in the consumer space and are therefore potentially enormous. Even if these ponds do have some royalties now, when you compare them to the potential royalties it must make current royalties look like zero. How are we to deal with such ponds? It would be a shame to leave them out!
The reason for insisting on significant royalties at the outset is to constrain wishful thinking. However, significance is not measured relative to the ultimate potential of a device category, but in absolute terms.
We want to know that the product really is shipping so that market forecasts are based on some sort of reality. The PDA market developed inconsistent with early forecasts based on Microsoft’s unproven view of Windows everywhere. Similarly, we should not extrapolate any category without first determining a realistic base and expected growth rate.
Consumer Internet Appliances are shipping with WIND software, presumably in significant volume to warrant serious treatment of the category.
I suspect we may be a bit early with wireless hand-held Internet Devices (2.5G and 3G devices), but perhaps the Motorola relationship alone provides sufficiency. Since WIND is working with most if not every equipment provider in this space, it seems to me that the significance criteria may be satisfied, if not today, then tomorrow. It is important to establish the significance of WIND’s position in this space because, as you indicated, this lily pond certainly should constitute one of WIND’s largest, if not THE largest.
The IP Phone lily pond is questionable vis a vis significance. With the large number of design wins, and companies like Pixtel chasing the category, I would hope it qualifies currently as a lily pond, but perhaps it does not. That’s something the thread can contemplate.
Allen |
