This week's Savitz article was interesting too...anyone want to post the whole thing...thanks.
online.barrons.com.
Unfortunately you need a paid subscription to read this online, and I only get the print version.
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A Trendy Gathering of Investing Futurists
By Eric J. Savitz
Word Count: 1,340 | Companies Featured in This Article: Palm, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, Apple, Research In Motion, Hewlett-Packard, Hewlett-Packard
TECH INVESTORS OFTEN EXHIBIT SIGNS OF MORBID MYOPIA, zeroing in on the next data point to the exclusion of any consideration of the long-term view. For traders, this is simply logical behavior: Tech stocks ping-pong all over the place. Miss the quarter by a penny, the stock gets whacked 10%. Miss by a dime, it can get cut in half.
There's no little irony in that behavior, though. When you talk about technology, you're really trying to imagine the future. Computers of unimaginable power! Tiny devices with impossibly huge storage capacity! Personal jet packs! Time travel! Or with the inevitable ...>>
At any rate, the predictions that caught my attention were about mobile. Excerpts include:
Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures): The movile phone will be a mainstream personal computer......All the data will be on the network. Lose the phone and simply buy another without any worries about lost data.
Roger McNamee(Elevation Partners): Betting on smartphones. The mobile device migration to smartphones from features phones will produce even greater disruption than the PC industry moving from character mode to graphical interface. (((Well he is not one for understatement...the article also had the caveat that this individual had a big investment in Palm))) Then he also mentions Nokia, Apple, and RIMM favorably.
Joe Schoendor(Accel Partners): Everyone on earth over the age of 6 will have a mobile device in 5-10 years.
The questions this brought up for me were the following:
1) How will the merger of Cellphone and VOIP service evolve and how will that affect where in the network the profits are? The smartphone manufacturers above will doubtless offer dual phones but as the VOIP component/access gets more and more ubiquitous, will these smartphones become more and more...dumb terminals...commodities? If data storage and actually applications are on the network...isn't the money in the applications as opposed to the little piece of hardware you need to access the potential vast array of applications and services?
2) Will the VOIP handset makers such as CSCO or Aastra or others also go dual (or are they already) to compete with the smartphone manufacturers above? Or at some point will ubiquitous wireless internet access make cellular passe?
3) Another thought is that the potential variety and robustness of applications and services available through VOIP providers, especially hosted services, would beat the wireless options such as what Verizon or ATT can offer on their cellular networks. Perhaps this is motivation for Verizon supposedly opening up its networks to some degree as per its announcement about that a few months ago. |
