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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC who wrote (8885)	8/9/2000 6:43:40 PM
From: dgurgel	Respond to of 10081

Rival for what? I know little about the business plans of phone.con or software.com but no one is out there saying, "We want to be just like General Magic." I think that the customized apps market may be the best GMGC can do now. That market does not have the explosive potential of the software technology guys like Nuance and Phone.com or the content/portal guys like Tellme. I would think the IBM deal has to show results very shortly. And I think that it will; but I am troubled that past strategic partners like Intuit and Juno just disappeared. Even Excite got no mention at the CC.

To: JC who wrote (8885)	8/9/2000 8:53:28 PM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10081

I wonder whether there is a market for customized UM? It seems that these things are becoming fairly standard. The Voice applications for call centers might be a different story. They could find the niche of making company specific interfaces. But again, this is a new development, which must stir up some revenues before you can place any value on it. Phone.com has just moved onto the real big leagues as the number 2 man at Cisco now taking the helm. The marriage of SWCM and PHCM will bring greater control over SMS and e-mail sharing applications. I wonder if this is a good enough reason for the merge. There must be more. The move to standardize web development to allow voice interaction with VoXML will make GMGC another player in a growing generic market. They have some advantage in their NOC, which they must find some way to utilize. Question is when will these voice apps be distributed? Why should any company want to have GMGC act as an ASP? Maybe there are good reasons, but why? Also, the blended effect of Graphic and Voice that PHCM will develop is going to make them the obvious choice. If they incorporate this into the mobile phone operators WAP servers, then you get a distributed effect, which might be more scalable and easy to service than GMGC's single behemoth NOC? Anyway, it seems evident that GMGC is stepping away from the royalty based Portico model. That means they have to have a subscription/royalty-based model for their customized apps? How long before a customer just wants to own the service? Look at the big apps at Charles Schwab and American Airlines? Why do they take these burdens onboard? I wonder also if GMGC is now trying to compete head on with Periphonics, which was purchased by Nortel, or Edify in the customized apps market? Anyway, it is interesting to see how Phone.com has identified the major market of the decade, aligned partners, built a major sales momentum and now has attracted one of the top executives in the world to take control. In the same time, GMGC has postured and suggested, meanwhile failing to fulfill every project they have attempted, except Onstar, which is still an open story. It's a magical alchemy, which makes these differences, but ultimately GMGC has just not been capable of meeting the challenge. In the end, it seems to be a simple case of poor leadership. Regards, Mark