Bebop a rebop,
Re: re: CSCO and the telco sector,
Tell me how to fix it. It's easy to talk about what's wrong.
What we have here is either a Humpty-Dumpty situation or a failure of reality to follow the cheerleading of the supply-side fantasy that supply creates its own demand.
All the Kings horses and all the kings men, aren't ever going to put the telecom capex market back together again. Not at least for the next couple of years. Why?
Here's a true story. I've got a friend who just bought a new house in a rural location and was keen on possibly splitting a T-1 connection with her neighbors. They are a bohemian lot of artisans, musicians and small business people. What my friend found was that she wasn't trying to interest them in an upgrade from DUN, but that she was in fact, the only one in the neighborhood who actually had a SOHO computer. My point? Perhaps all the early adaptors like you, me and the denizens of this thread are already int the game, and there simply isn't going to be a lot of new demand for higher cost datacom services going forward for the next few years.
I'd love to see this as you suggest, as a temporary glitch that can be fixed. But I don't believe that to truly be the nature of the beast. Just as the I-mode phone may well be a fad that had phenomenal success among Tokyo teenagers and the hype machine now says it will take over the world (a view loudly disputed by Jim Seymour at RealMoney.com), one could argue that in the industrialized first world, the Internet may have just come through the greatest period of percentage growth in nodes (i.e. attached devices such as PCs) that will ever occur. All new nodes proposed, eg. cell phones or automobiles, have inherent limitations on usability and a long way to go before they're ready for prime time. The current print edition of Red Herring has a series of articles on the use of the Internet in automobiles. The gist of these articles is that the technology is hampered because of concerns about distraction leading to accidents, lack of standards and puny impacts of profitability for the automakers. No doubt, cars will become more Internet connected, but again the problem becomes identifying who the clear winners of this technology advance might be. Red Herring certainly hasn't identified them. [[Generally, what is available in print from Red Herring shows up on the Web about a week to 10 days later. The cover date is 4/1/01]] |
