Eric, Part XIII
What's exciting to us is two things. First, this is a market we
stand to lead in a fundamental way. In the process of all of these
technology transitions and tough market competition, we've
actually gained share, and we've emerged as a strong leader
and we own the intellectual property, so this is a good market
for us, a bad market for everyone else.
But what's more exciting is the other piece, which is people will
want to get other forms of modems from us because, just like
you have ''NICs are us,'' you also have ''Modems R' Us'', and
this is a way for us to turn this into an advantage.
Q. One final question. We're hearing more and more about
voice from traditional data networking companies. What's 3Com
doing here?
A. Well I think it's the broader topic of delivering multi-media
services on the data infrastructures. I think this is a fundamental
shift in the marketplace that we want to ride very aggressively
by providing platforms that provide multi media services.
Our AccessBuilder platforms have been used very successfully
by large corporations to deliver voice, video and data integrated
on the same trunks. In addition to this, voice over IP is an area
in which we've made major investments in collaboration with
Siemens. We will also support voice services on the subscriber
side, subscriber side meaning today you buy a modem from us,
you buy Palm Pilots from us, you buy data devices from us. At
some point, these devices will be able to support voice as well.
And, of course, that voice will be digitized, and the voice bits
will be sent into IP packets across the data network.
Q. Did you say you were going to put voice on a Pilot?
A. Did I say that? There's going to be so many things in the
Pilot you're going to be blown away. |
