Hi Dave,
As I've understood it, Bluetooth is the standard unifying wireless communication for all PC's and peripherals, mobile phones are just a piece of all this. It operates by "creating a ten feet radius bubble around the gadget by radiowaves" as the dumbed down explanation on the morning tv had it. Infrared ports aren't part of it, but it might be two years before the Bluetooth products start to show up in sufficient volume to make the concept feasible, before that infrared might be the best solution. You buy the GSM card separately and just slot it into the laptop. It's really more or less the size of a fat credit card, I guess it has an internal antenna.
You're right, nothing much is happening on the thread of world's number one manufacturer of cellular phones. Americans are more interested in companies with more limited profitability or prospects, as long as they are wrapped in the Stars and Stripes and have a CEO with a penchant to a cult of personality... so I guess I plead guilty to being Eurocentric, but even so, I got nothing on my Yankee peers when it comes to nationalistic feelings. I'm citing *American* experts when I'm predicting the GSM's strong performance in the future. I'm not even bothering to talk about what the European experts think. Show me one American here following the European analysts... or is the idea that American investors could learn from European sources just too out there?
I hear this "mature market" argument every month or so. If you go to
newsalert.com
you'll see how European subscriber base is actually growing faster than American. Every estimate I've seen this year predict 40-45% growth in handsets for the foreseeable future. It's one of the most robust high tech markets in the world... and the conventional wisdom in SI is that it's a mature market. Hmmm... I get a flashback to the issue of nationalistic attitudes skewing analytic thinking.
Nokia and Ericsson are the most likely survivors in 2005, I can't help thinking that even though it sounds chauvinistic. Try to look at it from this POW: who would be better positioned to realistically evaluate the performance of a high tech giant in a small, obscure country; the citizen of that country with a barrage of information obtainable every day; or the citizen of USA, with only American sources with their dismissive, triumphalist attitude towards European technology companies? I guess both are biased, but I think the American bias is worse. Witness the spotty, thin coverage on Nokia and Ericsson throughout their stellar preformance throughout 1992-1998. Lucent seems like a true powerhouse, and Nortel is pretty awesome as well. But I don't think you appreciate the depths of Motorola's problems. Their brand is irrevocably tarnished here in Europe, it's literally the punchline of jokes among people owning cellular phones. They are also losing their grip of China according to Chinese market share statistics. Pagers are history and satellite phones are sci-fi as far as mass market is concerned. This is one sick puppy, and they gave the reins to a prisoner of Mot's illustrious history: the grandson of the founder, a man much too arrogant and proud to make painful, hard choices like selling the infrastructure equipment division.
Every time Businessweek or Fortune chose to put Motorola on the cover instead of the Nordics, they mislead tens of thousands of investors to ploughing their money into this hapless abomination. I maintain that the predictive power of European business news sources throughout the nineties has been much better in this field. And since European investors habitually read *both* American and European news sources, they have a clear edge over the considerably more parochial
Americans, to whom the idea of reading Financial Times or The Economist is probably an exotic and somewhat unwholesome prospect.
have a good one,
Tero
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