To: Noel de Leon who wrote (15333 ) 8/4/2000 4:34:05 AM From: hiker90 Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 29987 Hello to All, I've enjoyed this thread for a long time but swore I would not buy the SI lifetime membership until my Loral stock was solidly profitable. Thanks to Vman's efforts my wait has ended unexpectedly. Something snapped when I read this: >...But Jeanette Clonan, Loral vice president, said satellite phones are a different animal than cell phones, and the two shouldn't be compared with each other. "Globalstar is attempting to replace previous types of satellite phones, not cell phones," Clonan said.....< This statement by Ms. Clonan is depressing and represents many things wrong with G* marketing and probably management. Did they really build G* to snag the few 100 thousand Inmarsat users and terminals? Is yakking on a satellite phone really different than on a cell phone? Should it be? I don't think so. The best way for me to explain my thoughts is to compare what G* SHOULD do to what Southwest Airlines has already done. SWA longstanding mission is to compete against the automobile by pricing its tickets so low that people say to hell with driving between selected city pairs: Dallas-Houston, Chicago-Cleveland, Baltimore-Cleveland, LA-San Francisco, every city within 1K miles to Las Vegas and Las Vegas, and the list goes on. Compete against other airlines? Hah! Forget about them. Its regularly documented how SWA creates new airport traffic every single time they enter a new market. The Nashville airport saw passenger counts triple (roughly, its been a long time since I read that statistic) the year after SWA started service there. I remember reading about entrepreneurs establishing bus routes between Memphis and the Nashville airport. The airlines flying into Memphis, just 2 hours away from Nashville, couldn't be bothered to lower their prices. As stated here over and over by many, G*'s business is to create new yakkers, not competing against other high price sat phones. When SWA enters a new market, they create a mini frenzy with their initial extremely low prices. Politicians and press alike herald their arrival while the everyday folks snap up the tickets. Then as planes fill up, prices rise but never to the level that the other airlines were charging prior to their entry. For years, SWA like every airline here in the states has been using demand yield pricing programs, complex software (so the business articles say) that instantaneously measure demand and adjust ticket prices accordingly. Airline executives claim they maximize profits and minimize the number of empty seats. Maurice, does any of this sound familiar? Empty airline seat = unused G* minute = perished commodity. Rather than rapidly expand the number of cities, SWA uses new planes to add additional flights to the city pairs that have filled up. Hence, its slow steady expansion rate of 2-3 new cities per year. Can't get to G* Constellation 2 without filling up G*C1. Maybe G* management needs to understand what they are competing against. What/who is it? Not sure, just know it's not other high priced sat systems. It's not cellular companies. My guess is that G* needs to compete against cellular and WLL infrastructure providers. Make the cost of covering new areas low enough such that cellular executives say to hell with buying and maintaining our own equipment for these new areas. Just buy time on that newfangled G* service. Maybe it means opening up G* Constellation 2 to all cellular companies. Kinda like Quest and others don't really care which telephone companies purchase their fiber capacity. Probably lots of technical details need to be ironed before this becomes a reality. But, an earlier poster (months ago) said it best: G* is simply a super-cellular system. Hopefully Ms. Clonan and G* management don't really believe G* is something special. On that note, SWA is a close cousin to the cattle haulers and doesn't pretend to be anything else. Sell 'em cheap and pack 'em in. Here's some peanuts to tie you over. Thank you for flying SWA. Oh BTW, we've never lost money. Not even during the last recession ('91-'92). I realize I'm simply reiterating arguments posted here many times before. But, tonight I snapped to the fact there already exists a very detailed, voluminously documented marketing model outside of the electronics industry that G* could follow. Ryan Air of Ireland, Virgin Express, a new airline in Australia (forgot the name) are successfully copying the SWA marketing model. Why not G*?