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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (44955)	7/26/2001 3:18:01 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

but I think intellectual property comes under the category of resources. Reasoning that way, so does product. As a case in point, I don't have the foggiest idea about how CDMA works or why it may or may not work better than TDMA or GSM. I never have and I never will. But I am cautiously optimistic about my understanding of how the markets that will adopt those products might develop. I hope you will agree, though, that the better your understanding of the actual technology, the more confident and well informed your position would be. I.e., It is not that it is irrelevant or negative to understand the technology and product, but that, since doing so in depth is more than most of us can manage outside our own area of expertise, we have developed instincts, reliable sources, etc. for dealing with that which we understand imperfectly. But, even so, let's compare to the BEAS case. By analogy to QCOM it might be acceptable not to actually understand the technology of appservers, but doesn't one have to have a good feel as to whether building a top quality one is especially difficult, whether BEAS has any IP to protect theirs, whether others have one that is as good or might well be in a year? And, for that matter, doesn't one need some understanding of how big the Java appservers is currently and how that is likely to change in the next five years before we have any idea whether we are dealing with a mass or a niche market? What does it mean, for example, that despite hearing Java, Java, Java everywhere that there are still three times as many Visual Basic programmers as Java programmers (recently read, don't remember where)? Doesn't it matter that server-side Java is 2-3X slower than the equivalent C++ and might this not be a barrier to growth? Similarly for the e-commerce products: Are lots of people going to buy these modules? Will it mostly be ISVs or end-user developers? Do the ISVs pay again when they deploy? Do ISVs really expect to get everything from one vendor or are they going to mix and match because these are all nicely delineated objects and modules? What percentage of the ISV sales will trickle back to BEAS? Are there lots of additional modules BEAS can do to add to growth or are there only so many that people will buy versus develop? Is there anything on the horizon that might change this? How significant is the lock in once one of these modules is adopted? Etc. Don't we need to know those things?