Rob: More like Tip Toe Through the Tulips than Ride the Tiger
And yes, I've read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". I do not own XYBR or any other sprouting tulip wearables company, nor am I suggesting that anybody buy them or short them. I intended to use their current news worthiness to drive home a point about new markets (that IDT has parts for) and real products that are here now. Remember Rob, this is S O N Y (also spelled consumer electronics) makin this Geekwear rig. The parts are pretty generic and Sony should be able to drive down the price toot suite, far faster than XYBR ever would or even, dare I say it, Virtual I/O. Sony is also making the next generation of GIC super set tops. One of the reasons interactive TV failed awhile back was that the set tops cost $8,000, hardly a consumer item. That was only a few years ago. Now GICs highest end unit is $700. Sony ain't gettin into wearables so that they can sell a few thousand units to airplane mechanics and inventory takers. No sirrreee, bet your bottom dollar on that.
Ok Ok so these are not huge humungous markets like the PC - yet. But they
GET ATTENTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Attention drives stock prices, rising stock prices attracts capital, capital funds R&D, which creates new products, which get more attention etc. etc. Broadcom is a case in point; while the price of IDT carries only a modest premium over CY and ISSI. Wall Street is valuing IDTs logic capability at near ZERO. So did you know that Bank America is subsidizing the manufacture of the GIC box? That's what hype can do sometimes. And that helps put screamingly fast cable internet access in mine and your living room. Hey, I'm the new Gordon Gekko - Hype is Good! Well, to a point anyway. I don't know where this philosophy of pursuing only established mass markets came from. There are no margins there, as Tom "chainsaw" Kurlak so brutally points out. While IDTs margins will never be like Intels I see no reason not to get into markets at the beginning of their S curve and not at the end. So I guess my questions to Brian B, Perham, and Berg would be - not can you build the parts, but can you SELL them? Not, "are you talking to Dell or Compaq?" But are "are you talking to Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi?"
Btw you mentioned that you forgot the names of some of the wearables tulips. One of them is Irvine Sensors. This company may ring a bell. An old defense contractor that had a disastrous relationship IBM, that they are now just crawling out from under. If these guys can pull off half of what they are working on, they'll make XYBR yesterdays news.
irvine-sensors.com
I would certainly like to hear want you think about them. If you deem it inappropriate to discuss it on the IDT thread, that's cool. Email me if you've got the time. I believe my address is in our profiles. Thanks in advance. |
