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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP
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To: Grainne who wrote (912)2/20/1999 7:34:00 PM
From: Bradley W. Price  Read Replies (4) of 5853
 
Christine, I am interested in Mr. Gilder's reply as well, but I wanted to pass along the following:

I was at TRW in Redondo Beach a couple of years ago, and I was having lunch with some of the Odessy engineers. I was telling them about some of the problems we were having with the GPS antennas, and asking them how they intended to solve those problems for their phones in cities, in areas where there are heavy tree cover, etc. Their answer to me was that it wouldn't work well in a city with tall buildings because of the interference in line of sight.

I next asked them if it didn't work well in cities, who is their market. They assured me that their marketing people had identified a large enough market outside of the U.S. I asked them who the heck in S. America is going to spend $3-$10/minute on phone service who lives out in the country where they will have LOS view of the sats? Then it hit me - this is a phone network for the drug cartel! Being engineers, they didn't very much appreciate my insight into their marketing plan. They finished up their lunch and left.

Pretty soon, TRW dropped the Odessy because they couldn't get any other partners to buy in. I'm still convinced to this day that the only commercial market for sat comms is for high paid criminals. The military has a market because the nature of our mission, plus we can affort the airtime!

bp
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