Lured is more accurate than 'invited'. But the purpose was not for clobbering, but to con you into offering your useful knowledge. [Okay, a bit of fun is in order too]
Your specialty seems to be a good understanding of handsets and who's doing what. For example, I didn't know about the progress of the world phone. You have that info at your fingertips.
Also, you are an intelligent critic. As I mentioned, I'm looking for a failure mode. If the best critic does not point out anything worse than a minor skin lesion or two, then I'll take the Cindy Crawford deal.
We do get Globalstar critics here, but their analysis is along the lines of 'Globalstar's GEO sats suk and you guys are jerks' [for the most part, but there is some good comment about what's wrong]. So if you are able to field a contrary view and sustain it, then it's appreciated [though not by many, I admit].
You are quite right that the stumbles cost. They are costing right now 1bn minutes a month not used. At 10c a minute, we are failing to collect $100m a month, while the existing technology is aging, becoming obsolete, while not being sold.
Iridium missed the boat entirely [from a return on capital point of view though it is still, incredibly, providing service]. Globalstar has scrambled and the returns will be half what they could have been had things gone right and had marketing been feral.
The whole liesurely launch has been like a slow motion nightmare. There seems no sense of frenzy to get to market, fast. Many $$billions in market capitalisation and actual construction cost is dreamily drifting across the sky. Every day that drifts by is another fortune in losses.
Although that is true, the great thing about Globalstar is that the costs are so low, it'll still be a huge success. It's just a shame that it won't be the wild success it should have been. If demand is now huge, these 4 months of delay will be swept under the carpet, like the Zenit crash, and all will look fine.
4 months x 1bn per month = 4bn minutes x 40c = $1.6bn profit we are never going to get. It has already gone. We need to look at the loss of maximum income. The maximum has been shifted to the right and that's that!
I wonder if management offered staff, contractors and service providers 'performance rewards' to encourage frenzied activity to ensure delivery dates were met. I bet they'd have gone faster if a third of that profit was offered as incentive. $500m would have made a lot of pay packets bigger.
Okay, there have been delays, but there really is a system in the sky, with gateways and handsets on the ground, ready to rumble [in some areas]. Accounts so far are that handsets are selling fast. There are now THREE in SI alone, count them, Jim, Jon and Michael. That's serious cash flow!
Do you have any handset sales source from a friendly retailer?
Maurice
PS [off topic]: From a Finland coverage map I got <Voit my”s liikkua kartalla haluamaasi kohtaa klikkaamalla.>
It starts in French, then instantly changes to Greek, then goes off into a weird Maori/Japanese hybrid with joke words like klikkaamalla. Is klikkaamalla really a word? Why all the stuttering? Klikamal seems enough to do the job. Likua would be fine too. It seems that you people have raided the Welsh who have been left with no vowels. Maybe Finnish people used to live in Wales, and when the last ice-age receded, they moved north, taking the vowels with them. Maybe the kk ll aa ii is chattering [with cold] rather than stuttering? I can imagine people standing around in their reindeer skins [and antler hats], arms gripping themselves, shivering and chattering...some visiting linguist would have written it down as it sounded...hence 'k klik ka a m m ma l la'.
When I've made my fortune on Globalstar, I can take up etymology.
Hey, a quick Web search gives netwizards.com
<The Frankish chroniclers called the Vikings that attacked Nantes in 843 Vikverjar (probably, travelers by sea), or Westfaldingi 'Norwegians from Westfold'. Westfaldingi is a name traditionally connected with people who came from the Britannic Sea, or, more accurately, from Ireland.
In modern parlance, the word Viking inspires apprehension, and brings to mind thoughts of bloodshed, looting and pillaging.
>
The Vikings arrived from Ireland, so I guess the Welsh went a bit further afield and ended up in Finland. Let's face it, Ireland is full of bloodshed, looting and pillaging to this day. advernet.ie
The Welsh on the other hand, although missing some vowels, are notably pleasant, cheerful and creative. Like the Finns.
So, there you have it!
Plus ca change...
[Before a lot of 'Irish Americans' start telling me that Jim Willie and that Sinn Fein guy [Jerry Adams] are really nice people or that I'm racist, I should point out that some of my best friends are Irish] |
