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Strategies & Market Trends : Bowling Alleys and Tornadoes: G&K Hunting Grounds -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HeyRainier who wrote (18)	7/14/1999 10:51:00 AM
From: John Stichnoth	Respond to of 153

focus on markets where such battles even exist Great point, and right out of the book! (I too will watch for any suggestions of standards battles underway).

To: HeyRainier who wrote (18)	7/14/1999 11:47:00 AM
From: John Stichnoth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 153

Rainier, going through things in the last hour, I realized I'm involved with several companies involved in "standards battles" 1. Cisco v Lucent--The battle here is ATM against IP. ATM of course is the traditional "voice" protocol, supplying proven Quality of Service attributes. Cisco is trying to move the IP market to reliable QoS levels, so that voice could be provided over it. The market seems to think--and George Gilder thinks, if I remember right--that IP will be the eventual winner. 2. Voice/Mobile satellite services. The players in the low earth orbit are Iridium (lots of problems), Globalstar (to go live in September in a regional rollout), and ICO (apparently holding off on launches to see how G* does). There is limited space for satellites, and limited total capacity in the "low earth" range. So there will be limited players. 3. Fixed broadband wireless (FBBW)--One player is Winstar (WCII), though it's not a pure play and it's an installer not an equipment maker. Right now there are no standards. Each company is deploying its own equipment. I don't know who the equipment suppliers are. Over time, I would think this market would resolve to interoperability, and since there seems to be no organization agreeing on standards, perhaps the market will "spontaneously" annoint a standard, a la Moore's thesis.

To: HeyRainier who wrote (18)	7/15/1999 10:51:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 153

So is anyone monitoring a current battle to establish a dominant and fundamental standard, and one with only 2 or 3 viable competitive offerings? Those are the ones I would like to keep my eye on. Rainier, are you watching the Rambus (RMBS) action. There are two new RAM memory technologies emerging--Rambus DRAM and PC133. RMBS is the intellectual property holder for RDRAM. PC133 is being promoted by a loose coalition of manufacturers. RMBS hit a new high today. Suggest you do your dd on RMBS cause, as they say on the RMBS thread, "the bus is leaving". RMBS, imo is about to go into a tornado and it will be the emerging gorilla, and it will happen very bast.

To: HeyRainier who wrote (18)	7/18/1999 9:48:00 PM
From: quartersawyer	Respond to of 153

QCOM/ERICY "standards battle" teaches me" Trinidad, I'm glad you put the quotes around "standards battle", but I'm not clear about whether you are considering the Ericsson proposals to have been "viable". If one is to learn from what happened in that war, it must be understood that what Ericsson proposed was not viable, that Ericsson's objective was to delay and damage the progress of CDMAone toward an irrevocable advantage of GSM and whatever Ericsson was hoping to develop for a 3G technology, and that paid analysts failed to comprehend the issue (or were restrained by their companies who were engaged in lucrative work for Ericsson). The history of the war is lengthy, but for a succinct statement near a turning point read Message 6899536. At the present time, the recent management reversal at Ericsson may, in fact, signal a return of the "hagfish" strategy. The complete metaphorical association of that revolting creature can be accessed in the spectacular posts of Maurice Winn last Fall on the Qualcomm thread. If lessons are to be learned, all of Gregg Powers, Maurice, engineer and Clark Hare from that thread and that period of time would be of real value. I'm not sure of how to characterize the battle, but the competing hand held wireless device operating systems from Microsoft, Palm and Psion (through Symbian) is interesting. Personally I'm having a hard time working it through.