IMO, Dragon is a company in trouble. They lost a major contract in England to LHSPF a couple months ago, and I am unaware of any major affiliations since, whereas LHSPF continues to announce these. Dragon does not have easy access to capital, and no natural alliances that I'm aware of via its major shareholder, Seagate. LHSPF has the alliance with Microsoft and a hundred other companies. Without actually doing the research, my guess is that LHSPF has more affiliations than all its competitors put together. It has a major presence in the medical, legal, and translation fields, all far stronger than Dragon. At this point, Dragon's only niche seems to be in the consumer area. I'd be interested in comparable sales figures, now that LHSPF's product and Windows 98 are out. I think even in the consumer field, Dragon's in trouble because they did not build sufficient momentum with their several month head start over LHSPF to be able to withstand the impact of LHSPF's higher visibility, thanks to MSFT. I would not be surprised to see Dragon be sold to a bigger player, or to do an IPO, though I don't think either will solve their dilemma.
As for IBM, they have very good technology and engineers, but they don't have the focus that LHSPF does, and there are many affiliations which just aren't possible for them, because they compete with many tech companies in one sector or another.
So, IMO, the Fortune article is about 6 months behind the times, which is probably when it was written, but in tech time, that's a lifetime, and it's no longer pertinent.
Bob |
