Jay:
As far as tech is concerned, I am old fashioned: tech to me means hardware, not services. AOL was at one time quasi-tech, having whipped the phone companies into supplying it bandwidth, squatting on ARPANET, making a browser, etc. That took technical knowhow.
It's time is over now, and others do that stuff much better. The only thing I can think for them to do next is broadband....but they face the same obstacle as others....the last mile. But the last mile is the most expensive, and hard to pay for on individual revenues. Broadband wireless is the answer, but spectrum is the issue. Got to get rid of TV in analog form. CDMA/TDMA and about 1Ghz of BW for about 100 homes. That gets HDTV into them. Reuse the spectrum. But I digress.
As to the rise and fall of companies...someone came back to me with a counter to my argument that fiber was the future, something to the extent that technologies rise and fall. I was bothered by that, and it took until last night for me to realize the true issue. The true issue is most sectors of the economy grow over time, due simply to population and lifestyle improvements. What really happens to companies is technologies come and go within the sector. Take transportation: walking, animals, carts, boats, canals, railroads, trucks and busses, airplanes. Each technology rose and became a commodity, and did not decline until the next technology came along (or declined along with everything else like in depression).
In transportation today, the airplane is in the commodity phase, and there is little compound growth left in any of the companies. Same with autos. The whole sector is slow. Demand growth is not there.
Not so in communications. Booming compound demand. The communication technology of the moment is fiber. Nothing has come along to replace it. The market is expanding faster than the companies capacity to address it, even now.
JDSU seems like the best play to me for now. 100 years from now? Maybe transportation again: personal rockets?
:-)
-Own |
