Bill & Gary: re: "Goodtree said he could not see what magic bullet Sprint had that other telcos like AT&T, MCI, Bell Atlantic, Quest, and Williams did not."
Goodtree is exactly correct. Anything Sprint can do, the others can. There is no franchise possible for service providers. They have to bet the firm on their guess about which technology will turn out to be the most efficient/scalable/reliable. That's why I made a basic decision, during this era of digital convergence (yes, it's really here) to invest in infrastructure (and possibly content) providers, and not service providers. There is going to be massive overbuilding, there is going to be many billions spent on hardware that turns out to be a technological dead-end. There will be a darwinian winnowing out among the service providers. Fiber-optic networks are being built the same way railroad networks were put up 120 years ago. Cisco is like the company selling engines to all the railroads in 1880. And Cisco will sell to all of them, the losers and the survivors and the winners.
And you don't really need to understand all the technical mumbo-jumbo, because any guess about which piece of equipment is best, is just that: a guess. I'll let the market tell me, and I'll bet on their past track record. When you buy CSCO, you're not relying on the success of any particular piece of equipment. No matter how good it is, it'll be obsolete soon anyway. Rather, you're buying the management, the culture, the balance sheet, the track record of being first to market with the best. And, again, I let the market tell me which is the best. Discussion of the technical merits of any particular piece of hardware is just noise in the signal, to me.
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