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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (48131)	6/19/2001 12:16:22 AM
From: John Trader	Respond to of 70976

Ian, Perhaps one reason I keep bringing up this off-topic topic, is that I see a lot of parallels to the semiconductor industry, and think this same brainpower we have on this thread should work in this sector of technology also. It is amazing when you think about Moore's law. One would think all the semiconductor companies would go broke having to double performance every 18 months at the same cost, and one would also think that it would be impossible to "light" all those chips. History, of course, speaks for itself. But in this fiber optic area, Wall Street is really spooked. Regarding the fiber glut and GLW, one analogy I heard is that of the railroad industry. At one time railroads were overbuilt and most companies that built them were in trouble. One differnce here though is that fiber optics is used in cities also (don't have railroads connecting buildings), and sales also can go international (kind of expensive to ship rails around the world - I don't think that happened). Plus I don't think the rate at which railroad usage increased ever approached a rate of doubling every 3 months (apparently true at some point for internet traffic). I think one must be careful when using analogies from the past. Having said that, I am still clueless with this fiber glut thing, and how these stocks such as GLW perform over the next year or two. John