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Technology Stocks : Gemstar Intl (GMST) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quidditch who wrote (2387)	3/18/2000 8:54:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6516

Sheesh! When I look at the names of people participating in this forum, I realize that I know everyone from the G&K folder. I haven't posted here in the past, mostly because I don't want Climber to know how little I absorbed from him years ago. Regardless, I've just gotta respond to Steven's post about: part of the vision here is that the e-books will be delivered, in time, on a GMST IPG-enabled set! My thanks to Stew for passing that along to me in a PM. I don't know if it has been discussed here, but from the very first day the acquisition of the e-book companies was announced I was firmly convinced that we will some day see e-books imbedded with a remote control for the television as well as an IPG. It makes so much sense to have all those products available in one device that it's difficult to imagine it not happening. For the folks who are concerned that the e-books might become a royalty game or at best a gorilla-like game with low switching costs, a legitimate concern in my mind until proven otherwise, you might want to look at it a little bit differently. I see the day that the e-books will be absolutely free of charge or at least heavily subsidized as has happened with cell phones. Why? So Gemstar can sell subscriptions. So Gemstar can put advertising in your e-books, continually changing advertising that will arrive with your IPG updates. So Gemstar can send you a note included in your next IPG update that says, "I see that you like Stephen King. We have a fine line of other books written by him. And when you click on this icon you'll see a list of times that movies based on his books will be broadcast on your television." In other words, this may be an area in which we want every electronics manufacturer to sell or give away their e-books because it becomes a distribution network for Gemstar's IPGs and advertising. There's no doubt that the e-book business model is going to be an evolving one that has a tremendous opportunity of leaning to the Godzilla model. My long-winded point is that, yes, I'd prefer any business model with proprietary, open architectures accompanied by extraordinarily high switching costs. That would put Gemstar totally in control of whatever business model it wants to pursue for e-books. But if that's not possible, the downside of e-books has more long-term potential than many business models' upside. How rude of me to make my first post here such a long one. You folks have probably covered these issues ad nauseum already. Blame it on Stew for sending me Steven's post. :) --Mike Buckley