Speech recognition is surely going to be a major force creating change in any number of workflows during the next ten years. So I agree completely that this a company that one should be long in for the long-term.
My one worry is the spate of translation agency purchases and how digesting these will affect software development. In my view, the big opportunity here is speech recognition software. Translation is a much smaller market. Of course, speech recognition software must work in various languages, but that doesn't necessarily entail buying translation agencies.
As the owner of a pre-press service bureau whose clients include several translation agencies, I am familiar with the difficulties of these service industry companies. They require sound management to make a good profit, retention of talented workers is a major problem, and there is a limit to their profitablity (i.e. you can sell 1,000 or 1000,000 copies of a software product without too much change in infrastructure, but a given translation agency can only translate so much without incurring serious personpower/growth problems).
So I would hope that LHSPF does not get sidetracked by these acquisitions, and stays focussed on the software end of things. If they do a good job of that, Bill will market it for them, and things will go well. If they don't, Bill will go play with Dragon or cut a deal with IBM, and we will all be unhappy. |
