Doug - Great stuff on the edge strategy. You are more of an "edger" than I thought! These are interesting opportunities and COMS can take advantage of them.
In addition to the Servers and high volume low cost software - I thought part of the story was that for things like VoIP it was also a big advantage to make the equipment like the Total Control Hardware, that ISP's would use, and to which the edge devices would communicate. In other words, if to introduce a new edge device, there was a complementary change in the ISP equipment that was needed, only COMS could deliver it. This allows them to set the same kind of proprietary, or at least defacto standards, that makes CISCO so profitable in Routers, and MSFT profitable in OS's and Applications. (Hold on - better not get carried away here - we are talking about COMS at 20 after all.)
Given that you also are excited about the "edge" strategy - who is the best person to shepherd it through to completion? Off hand it would seem like the originator of the strategy would be best - Benhamou. But I can buy the need for a more short term focus on operations from someone like Claflin. But that is what COO is supposed to do - avoid the street surprises and the quarterly volatility in earnings. However, in my opinion, this volatility is mostly due to the zero-inventory planning model which is designed to get rid of the channel stuffing debacle of the early USRX acquisition. The paradox, is that management has adopted this model to convince the street that it can't engage in channel stuffing any more, the outcome though is that with the first set back - which has to come from the zero inventory model, the street forgets what they asked for in the first place.
I like these suggestions of what to look for going forward for milestones.
To achieve these goals COMS needs to form Partnership agreements with the
Main wireless Providers. The Company needs to focus its R&D pool both talent
and monies to coming up with an Integrated Palm that is truly revolutionary and
will be atleast 3 yrs ahead of the Competition.
Isn't the deal to combine the PDQ Smartphone from Qualcomm with the Palm Pilot one such deal? In other words, as long as it is consistent with the data oriented features of CDMA that can be used with the PDQ, it would seem that some of the deals with the phone companies might not be as necessary.
Analysts have pointed out that Benhamou's plans have called for features in NICS which allow them to be intelligent and respond to software. They argue that companies have not been willing to pay for these so far. Do you know why this part of the "edge" strategy is not working? What was the idea and how can we gauge its success down the road. Does it require different switching or software before companies value the intelligent NIC?
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