In your (or anyone's) experience, is it likely (or even conceivable) that AXC management is reading this board? I sure hope so.
I assume that they do especially since the signal to noise ratio of this board has increased by an order of magnitude since the, er, "exorcism" conducted by somebody who, in sheer exasperation, just had to personalize the devil in the details required keep tabs of an extemely high-risk, extremely high-rewards stock like AXC. Man, the other board and even this one early on used to be a regular parade of people publicly shadowboxing with their own personal demons, auditioning for Oprah, doing their Wade Cook impressions, people doing stupid ego tricks, ego brawls over chicks, etc. LOL Anyway, it may all have been just a case of the.....
BLIND LEADING THE BLAND
Consumers are driving digital media in ways that Hollywood executives, artists, financiers, and entrepreneurs never expected: they have many more entertainment options and much more power than in the past, and companies interested in creating, producing, or distributing digital content must now consider every possibility. William Goldman, the screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among other movies, famously dismissed Hollywood's ability to pick hits by saying, "Nobody knows anything."For the time being, that holds true for digital entertainment, too.
herring.com
Red Herring is a great magazine with a great website. Digital Hollywood has been the focus of every January issue until this year when they expanded it to Digital Entertainment. The RH archive is a goldmine.
...but what's the board's consensus as to AXC's objectives?
Ed Perry has been assembling and reassembling the few bits of concrete info that we have into the closest thing we have to a road map right now. I think it's useful to keep this in front of us repeatedly in 1999. 1999 has a distinct "river meets the sea" look and feel to it. Strong cross-currents, undercurrents, debris, etc
The strategy (long term):
"Looking to the future, the initial stage of our acquisition plan is to create a group of businesses in the digital image field that provide services as well as equipment. In particular, we are considering the acquisition of a web hosting company since, although it is not possible today to offer good quality video on the Internet, this could change as the availability of bandwidth increases. This is an area that could offer opportunities for companies like Ampex that have digital video know-how." ... [and] ...We have also added senior management capability through the appointment of an experienced new vice president of sales and marketing who is expected to become our chief operating officer early in the New Year. Increased management depth will allow us to pay attention to acquisitions without detracting from our existing activities.
Message 7054926
The one fatal mistake that I believe AXC can make is to wait for the bandwidth to arrive before they implement their web biz model, whatever it is.
As I see it, the bandwidth issue can be segmented in two admittedly simplistic ways:
1) Last mile - xDSL versus Cable Modems. Wireless for certain niche markets. I agree with those who say that ATT's acquisition of TCI is the catalyst needed to shift the competing rollouts into high gear.
2) Backbone - You have fiberoptic lines being laid left and right --along railroad tracks (QWEST), along natural gas pipelines (WMB),etc
Once those fiber optic lines are laid out, it becomes a matter of increasing the channels available on each fiber. Lucent, for example, will start rolling out technology in 2000 that will allow it to multiplex 100 channels on one fiber!!
But see, if you look at the experience of the supercomputing crowd, just when you think you have enough bandwidth, there is no shortage of applications that will emerge that will eat up all that bandwidth. The last time I checked the supercomputing crowd in this country was lashing mainframes and servers together and hooking them all up across theountry via the most advanced optical networks available to model the birth and death of stars. The early datasets are so dense that extemely rich images are necessary to put the data in any useful perspective.
If you bring down that to the level of the mainstream commercial and consumer market, even if enough bandwidth were made possible to, say, make broadcast quality video available, the sheer number of people shipping those high quality video files across the network would quickly overwhelm the network.
That is why there is an attempt by the likes of CSCO, Lucent, Nortel, etc to impose a cable-like structure on the bandwidth coming our way:
1) basic (free)
2) intermediate (step-up types of fees)
3) advanced services with QOS (Quality of Service) guarantees (for premium fees, of course).
Some of us believe that Ampex, the once and future(?) king of video, should start using the web host right now to develop an business model that will mirror the kind of model used by the bandwidth bandidos.
The one-eyed leading the blind? Or the other way around?
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