Stitch:
Good chart - makes you wonder how Veritas and Dragon get factored into SEG's price. Or don't.
Here's my quick-n-dirty on Dragon and Windows.
Message 7105800
Overall, I'm waiting for the flurry of information that will precede the Dragon IPO. Right now their info is hard to come by. Don't know how they're doing with their laywer/doctor/butcher/baker versions, but Lernout (via Kurzweil) has a major installed base in a big bucks segment. Dragon is a recent entrant after IBM in that area. Also, remains to be seen how much of a market there is for just a dictation app (albeit a good one) which is what Dragon has on the market now. I think the trade off between a few percent points on accuracy and having navigation that works will be compelling in the consumer market.
Lernout has been pretty aggressive with embedding, IBM has been falling behind, and Lucent has made inroads in the call center market. Embedded revenue should be a nice, steady stream but I think the real challenge and the battle will be on the desktop. The balance there tilts towards Lernout simply because of you know who ... oh, wait - is that somebody knocking at my door?
Is there some intrinsic advantage that SEG can get out of VRTS and DRGN in the storage area? I doubt it. Not one I can see, at any rate. Voice is just an interface, is my take on it.
If you've got a good recognition-cum-parsing engine you've got everything. Sort of. Who walks away with the prize is simply a matter of who piggy-backs the OS monopoly. Going forward, I think natural language parsing will be the real determinant of success in the long term. Speech recognition itself is probably a commodity already. Atleast in the limited-context, embedded apps area. The Star Trek "computer, do this, do that" scenarios are a ways off - four or five years atleast or more, relying as they do on much more than just getting the phonemes strung up correctly in standard, expected contexts. "I'm cooking!" Am I on a roll? (see what you started Robert? :) Making dinner? Dying from the heat? What? The context expands outward from simple word-only concatenations. But I digress.
Why would I look at Dragon when it IPOs, when it looks like Lernout has it all tied up vis-a-vis Windows and blahblahblah? Quite apart from everything else, looking a couple of years ahead into appliance-land, I'm loooking at an AOL box with a Netscape browser and wondering - Hmmm....I wonder what they have in there? Why does it keep saying "You have mail! You have mail! Should I read it to you now, huh? huh?" and why does it belch out fire and smoke with each "huh?" ...do they have...like a dragon in there??
mano |
