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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (8807)	10/8/2000 2:09:21 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

JK, re: Are there cases where, in telecomms, companies have missed the boat completely? There are lots of examples, JK. Siemens missed the boat completely in GSM. ERICY and NOK stole the thunder. ( I'll not mention that ALA missed the boat (miserably) as well just not have zbyslaw owczarczyk come after me). Siemens is trying hard to catch up. Microsoft missed the Internet and played catch up. Enough of examples: My theory that those companies lost the train because they kept breathing their own air. They like to hear their own voices. They like the hard facts AND neglete the 'soft facts'. 'Soft facts' it is what I call my opinions about ADSL being Kaputt. Edsel stories: The MAN Metropilitan Area Networks that never made it with DQBD FDDI We have now: Edsels: came to life but never made it MAN DOA (Dead On Arrival): G.Lite Dead but forgot to lay down (ADSL): Assymetrical, home user oriented, with CO co-located DSLAM

To: axial who wrote (8807)	10/8/2000 2:54:47 PM
From: justone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Jim: Trust the power of hindsight! Analysts are always right by their downgrades AFTER news, history is written by the winners, and my stock theory is proven right using historical data all the time- trust me, I've never been wrong before.. I've been wrong. We must also be careful with hindsight judgments- Mr. Gates is often quoted with ridicule for saying ``640k Should Be Enough for Anybody.'' This is the reverse of the truth- he was saying that you don't need a mainframe, a small 'dumb' computer could do a lot, and most people could be quite happy with the PC in 1981 instead of time sharing on a mainframe. He is now the richest man in the world, and was himself instrumental in breaking the larger and larger memory barriers by building fatter and fatter OSs. Really good mistakes go to the grave with the company, or the company reinvents itself quickly. They fall into three categories: 'Titanic" moments, as when the captain went ahead at full steam despite the rumors of icebergs, missed opportunities, which I might call missing the boat, as when XEROX missed the boat on their inventions, including Windows, or simply bad execution, which I call slow boat, such as in spreadsheets the visicalc debacle and Lotus' slow development gave Microsoft the opportunity to enter the application market with EXCEL. Titanic Moments: hitting the iceberg 1. IRIDIUM is a prime example of upper management at Motorola going at a problem even thought they had been told it wouldn't work: the penalty for arrogance is severe. 2. Lucent getting out of cable voice and dropping their customers. They will have trouble recovering from this. Missing the boat: 1. Lucent missing customer demand on fiber (recently) 2. Almost everybody but Craig McCaw missing the cellular boat 3. Siemens, Lucent, Alcatel missing the GSM boat 3. ITT selling off telecom just as Telecom was about to ramp up (Mr. Rand Araskog, to point the finger); mind you ITT stock went up, but what would it have done if a competent manager had built a company on the telecom base Slow boat: 1. Microsoft losing the set top market because they are late 2. ATT messing up the dial-up access market (pre-Armstrong) 3. Lucent, lately- it is a bit early to tell but McGinn may be a textbook case of a poor manager, unless he can turn things around. My favorite example is his recent actions after the second bad quarter in row, saying, in effect, "This is unacceptable. I take full responsibility. I am firing some VP's to prove this." Am I the only one to see that maybe the problem isn't the VPs? However, I'm waiting for the benefit of hindsight to prove this correct. 4. CISCO failing to get into telecom, and thinking that their enterprise dominance will succeed in the telco market- they are just too slow to get it. Again, I'm waiting for hindsight to prove this correct, but we are getting closer. For most companies culture is far more important than leadership- and when you have a bad embedded culture, you are in trouble.