Indeed: <I feel comfortable in saying that the SPOT product and innovation saved the company from certain extinction. >
It did excite me. When it came out, I was in the process of preparing to abandon ship and SPOT looked so good that I thought it could be a vast success.
Then I remembered how Globalstar thinks. "Wow! This is real space age stuff. It's worth its weight in gold. We'll charge a LOT of money for it." Sure enough, it was not cheap, and is run along OmniTRACS lines.
A friend who had also bought GSAT was also very excited by SPOT but my cynical, jaundiced and jaded opinion persuaded him to abandon ship too. He had ridden Globalstar into the ground too first time around, to his very great cost and financial despair.
I saw an advertisement for a GPS navigation, and messaging gadget yesterday in the newspaper and it must be quite a threat to OmniTRACS.
The old days of high-end products for a few "vertical markets" or military enthusiasts is over. We the proletariat have the money, similar needs to each other and enable the economies of scale which drive cyberspace.
A billion of us putting in a dollar or even 20c enables pretty well anything to be developed. Even the poorest people on the planet can afford $1 for things that do stuff like SPOT.
But we don't want a back pack full of gadgets either.
Think nano.
OmniTRACS had only a few hundred thousand customers. Reinventing that system cost real money on such a unit cost scale. Geeks don't come cheap.
Companies who don't get it will fail. Google gets it. Microsoft didn't. I went from being a loyal MSFT user for 20 years to one scared to let Microsoft near me. It's true I'm using XP right now, so it isn't all over yet, but for other products, I'm too scared to use them because they are like a giant virus taking over my computer. I got beaten up by Vista and $1000 of laptop became a brick. That caused me considerable resentment. Actually, under NZ's fit for purpose laws, I could probably have got my money back, but it would have been hard work and Microsoft probably would have fought me every inch of the way. They won, I lost, so now I have the principle, "If it's Microsoft, don't touch it if there's any other way of doing it". Personally, such victories don't seem like victories to me.
So, Messenger and other things are persona non grata in my world. I got a Microsoft headset at about the same time as Vista and it sits on a shelf, unused. It seemed to require a lot of fancy know how and processor power to get it into gear. I was even warned by a world scale Geek to not get Vista, but being a dumb user, I figured he meant because it technically wasn't a fine work for Geeks and people wanting to do stuff. A bit like Apple holds people hostage to their system.
That's okay by me if they work. That was my attitude to Microsoft until Vista chewed me up and spat me out. Maybe it was the laptop maker who I should blame for trying to squeeze Vista into a shoebox, but I had assumed Microsoft wouldn't allow Vista to be sold in an unusable state.
With Google's Nexus running Android, it's all Google and one knows who to blame when Gmail goes on the blink, or they sell my private information to China. Google seems to run on Mqurice principles.
Yes, SPOT is a good product. But so far, it looks like they intend to handle it like OmniTRACs and Microsoft. A niche product for a few rich enthusiasts. Presumably they'll do the same again with voice. Treating Globalstar like a "spectrum play" rather than a sacred obligation to the future is ringing alarms to me.
The device I saw yesterday gives position, orientation, mapping, messaging ... voice over Skype should be doable.... hmmm, maybe I'll get it out again. Of course it will be one of those hopeless geostationary voice delay devices so that won't work. Globalstar has the LEO, being the essential ingredient of voice - depending on the price.
Mqurice |
