Taxi, be careful with this one.
It would be a hands down avoid if it weren't for the deep pockets and connections of Paul Baran, Gate's early programming partner in MS Basic and hense billionare.
Technology sounds good, concept sounds fairly good. Financials are horrible. Talking road to bankruptcy. Seems marketing has been horrible. Frankly, hard to avoid conclusion that managment has left something to be desired.
However, a large part of problem probably is that management needs, and always has needed, massive capital.
This is not like some cleaver program that will make a hitherto almost functionless but kinda neat box that claimed to be a computer and showed you so with switches and diode lights (the first PC, the Altair), actually spit out an intelligible sentence or two and therefore appear functional. (MS basic, at the beginnings.) And because there was no competiton grow to provide programing on many early PC's and then bootstrapped against weak competition to become the disk save/retrieval system (first DOS operating system).
This is more like McCaw starting to build up Cellular One.
What's needed is a messianic tony salesman who can get the money flowing. But now the company is a bit long in tooth. Sense of lost opportunities... an odor of.... well....failure.
New higher speed technology offers some promise in that it is a leapfrog to something better for all and sundry that what's available on wireline. Whether or not for a few bucks more. Which is a paradigm shift while it lasts. Still, even if it is real and ready, they need the visionary tony pitchman. Who their CEO, by all appearances on CNBC is not. (Few are.)
Save your dollars. Its a pitty, i'd love it to pan out. Hope it does. Will eye it from time to time. If it starts to I'll be happily wrong. Or something exogenous will have changed. Either way, interested.
Regards, Doug |
