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Technology Stocks : RealNetworks (NASDAQ:RNWK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A.Weiss who wrote (511)	4/6/1998 1:56:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5843

Hello A., > My RNWK investment has done well, but I'm concerned about the > future. Our investment has done quite well ... ;-) I'm not too concerned with the future yet ... > Would those who know more about tech than I do (which is > practically everybody) explain why the compression and > decompression of multimedia can't be incorporated into > a chip or some other kind of hardware. Compression and decompression can be implemented in hardware. IMHO, investing in RNWK should not be done purely on a technology basis. John Katz in Wired Magazine stated something like "Attention will be the currency of the future!" ... and currently RNWK has attention. Much of the power of internet related stocks has nothing to do with the actual technology or implementation, but rather on the number of users and "eyeballs" using the product. The future of these companies (just like Yahoo) is based on their ability to bring together the producers of content with the consumers of content ... and RNWK is doing a good job of that! Content is king ... but Context is Queen! RNWK has a good bit of both .. > Thank you. Scott C. Lemon

To: A.Weiss who wrote (511)	4/6/1998 12:47:00 PM
From: Nick Arnett	Respond to of 5843

Re hardware v. software codecs... A. Weiss asked about hardware compression and decompression for multimedia. As has been pointed out, there are specialized chips for these purposes. However, it's not clear that one should bet on them. The issue is that next-generation general-purpose processors often outperform today's special-purpose chips. What's more, general-purpose processors are in every computer and are backward-compatible with the software. If you write your software for the special-purpose chips, you have to re-write it for each chip generation, losing time-to-market against those who bet on standard CPUs. The result has been a focus on software that runs on general-purpose chips, with special-purpose chips as accelerators. This topic inspired me to dig up a piece I wrote in 1989 when Rob Glaser (founder of RNWK) was named manager of Microsoft's multimedia initiative. Even back then, he would not endorse special-purpose chips and emphasized the need for solutions that reach the broadest possible audience. Nick