RIP is premature OK2. The current shareholders are certainly not sitting on $1000 in NPV given the terrible state of marketing so far. But $1 is only $350 million of so, which isn't much combined with the total debt.
The critics have NOT been proven right about the construction of the system. The system produced high-quality minutes which needed about 7c a minute to cover their cost. Those are cheap enough and justified construction. The price to the user was the problem. $3 a minute to deliver a minute to a subscriber from a system which produced those minutes at 7c a minute is where the problem lay. Greedy, greedy, greedy is how the Service Providers [including Loral] approached a brilliant business opportunity. They killed it!
The construction cost of the system was NOT too high for the mass market. The price charged for that system was much too high for the mass market, [which is what 7 million subscribers is, despite the marketers in Globalstar thinking 7 million people is a niche market].
Yes, this has been a happy little stream, with heaps of information and informed analysis both pro and con. My thanks to Rocket Scientist, Geoff Goodfellow, Mr Adrenaline, Dr Evil, Valueman, PCSTEL, rfhombre, Pierre, Jim Parkinson, METMAN, Gregg Powers, TB68, Jon, KyrosL, Ben[without the jamin] Garrett, Michaelth1 and heck there are so many people who have been so informative and knowledgeable. For example the guy who kissed the nose-cone down in Florida before one of the launches. Thank you all. [It's probably rude to name some people because then those not named will think - "Hey! What about me...". ]
The single most important opinion on which I didn't place enough value was Valueman's judgement about the people he had dealt with and the continuing denial of reality which came from Globalstar. I teetered and tottered thanks to Valueman, but finally decided that while he was right, and I'd seen the same things myself, I gave Globalstar, Vodafone and other service provider people too much credit for the ability to recognize the error of their ways and tidy up their act. They didn't. I have to accept that what I thought was just corporate comfort zone and smugness, which would break up in the cold light of customer reaction beyond the bunker walls of San Jose and the corporate miasma of Vodafone, was in fact something worse which was NOT going to change in reaction to reality, or actuality as Bernie calls it.
Well, reality has ways of dealing with those of us who get it wrong. Thanks for your views Valueman! You are the champion. Your comments reverbrated in my head from the day you made them and were my touchstone of self-doubt. Still, we are not down to the last rites yet. It's now a new century, only 2 weeks old, and I think the Leopard is about to change its spots.
Mqurice [being Winnowed] |
