Ya'll are wasting your time with Mark. He will tow his company's line and repeat their rhetoric, whether he believes it or not.
When Rockwell says they have 70% of the existing installed base of modems, they are referring to everything from old 300/1200 baud units to 14.4 fax modems to currently-for-sale 28.8/33.6 modems. That includes modems currently residing in landfills, parked inside fax machines, and sitting dormant in various electronic scrap heaps. Saying they have a 56k technology advantage from that is like saying they have a better rotary telephone dial knob. Who cares - you can't install it onto a pushbutton phone.
The bottom line is that people have bought modems with Rockwell chipsets in the past for 2 reasons: 1) they were the only game in town prior to five years ago; and 2) they were cheap. Rockwell has always used a monolithic chipset architecture that is not software upgradeable, but is cheap to produce. They were similar to Intel in that they would create their own product cycles with advances in modem speed. Since their modem chipsets could not be software upgraded, they got to sell the whole world new modems.
Then came Texas Instruments and US Robotics. For many year, USR was a major customer of Rockwell. But, in recent years they partnered with TI to design a dynamic modem architecture that employed a generic digital signal processor and Flash memory to store the microcode, and thus produced a software upgradeable modem. Texas Instruments built the silicon, and US Robotics built the code to run it. It was more expensive to produce, but it allowed the engineers and programmers to routinely tweak the product to improve performance, while owners of Rockwell based modems were revlocked. The OEMs didn't buy Rockwell chipsets because they were better or easier to use - they bought them because they were cheaper and gave them a cost advantage. Period. Anyone who claims different is either being deceptive or has been deceived.
So, we now have a situation where millions of existing US Robotics modems can be upgraded to 56k with software, and zero installed Rockwell modems can be similarly upgraded. That give US Robotics something called leverage. They can use the existing installed base of software upgradeable modems as a lever, or a springboard to instantly get their product into the user community. Rockwell enjoys no such leverage with their "70%" installed base. And, they are not creating any leverage because it will be months before they produce any material quantity of software upgradeable modem chipsets.
When is the last time you heard anyone say "Buy a Rockwell modem - they're better." Never. However, you will often hear people recommend a USR modem. USR certainly has their detractors too, which is to be expected when you have sold tens of millions of a product. Nonetheless, todays buying public is much more informed about modems, and becoming more so every day. USR has name recognition, Rockwell has none. You can't go into a store and buy a Rockwell modem, since they don't make modems, but rather modem chipsets. However, you can walk into any store or open any mail order catalog and find a plethura of USRobotics modems.
Rockwell has the long list of ISPs, modem OEMs, and RA server OEMs who are going to user their modems, at least initially. Why would anyone be surprised by that? These are the same companies who use Rockwell modem chipsets now, and have for years. Does anyone expect them to suddenly start buying their modem internals from US Robotics, their direct competitor? We're talking about Ascend, Shiva, Cascade, Cisco, Zoom, Boca, et al. Please understand that it's USRobotics against the world, but it's the exact same world they have been competing with and taking market share away from for years! Nothing has changed, except that USR is way ahead of the pack in deploying the technology, and they have direct control over both ends of the connection. Rockwell's market presence is achieved through a highly fragmented mass of hundreds of companies, who are all stuck with a obsolete and non-upgradeable modem. Meanwhile, USR's RA customers all get software upgrades.
USR is an elephant in a room full of mice. The mice may have the numbers, but it's the elephant that enjoys long life and gets all the attention. |
