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Technology Stocks : JDS Uniphase (JDSU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (19054)	2/23/2001 3:14:29 PM
From: pat mudge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24042

That piece from Reuters notes that a recent survey concluded that most folks see no need for Internet access on portable devices. To no one's surprise, gadget-obsessed Japan was the exception. It's not that we don't need them, it's that the infrastructure (3G) isn't there to support them at the speeds that make having them compelling. Dot-com companies say they collapsed because the capital markets dried up, but any publicly traded company that can't quickly sustain itself on its own operations is probably a bad business model anyway. There is no advantage to buying toys or pet food online. Dot-coms failed because they didn't exist to begin with. What do I mean? I mean that investment banks and VCs brought ideas public, not companies. When their businesses didn't bloom overnight, they had to go back to Uncle IB and Aunt VC for more funds. That was fine as long as there was adequate liquidity in the market. When that ended --- and here monetary policy comes into play --- these ideas parading as companies started to fold. Go figure. Sales of PCs and wireless handsets didn't slow down simply because of higher interest rates. They slowed because current PCs and cell phones are more than adequate for almost any task. Not many people felt compelled to buy a G4 Cube from Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), or a Pentium 4-powered box from Dell (Nasdaq: DELL). Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERICY) discovered that almost everyone in Europe and the United States who wants a wireless phone already has one. Again, it has little to do with need and a lot to do with quality. If 3G auctions hadn't skyrocketed and made paupers out of the companies that would spur the growth of infrastructure, progress would be much swifter. Again, governments can share some of the responsibility. Telecom companies didn't stock up on equipment in the first half of 2000 just because the prime lending rate moved up half a point. They bulked up on inventory because they didn't want to be burned by a parts shortage later in the year. Now there's a glut instead. In any case, network expansions ran wild in the mid- and late 1990s; at some point, companies had to take a breather. This falls in the lap of carriers and their complete dependence on access to money to maintain their businesses. Here more than any other place, failure sits squarely in the Federal Reserve's lap. Yes, I admit many CEOs are blaming their woes on the economy. And in part that's unfair. Let's not let the Fed or other government agencies off completely. Incidentally, there may be adequate fiber installed (debatable) but it has to be lit. And that's where amplifiers and lots of other fiber optic gizmos come into play. Pat