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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology - Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stitch who wrote (677)	3/15/1999 11:22:00 PM
From: manohar kanuri	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1989

Stitch, Robert, all: And the good news doesn't stop there. Over the weekend they sent out free upgrades to version 3.5. So now I can dictate right into the browser - as I am now into IE 5, into Outlook 98, and navigate around most Windows applications. This is a significant and dramatic improvement over version 3.0. A couple of months ago I was kvetching in this thread (I think) about this. Earlier I was a little skeptical about what looked like turning into a niche, pure dictation company, albeit a very good one, but this changes the whole picture. Not being able to navigate around Windows would have been a severe handicap as far as irrational exuberance goes, and valuing the stock would have been a tussle between focused excellence in dictation and uselessness in navigation and the inferences that flow from there. What impresses me is that despite having an excellent product, the company followed through with a free upgrade even though they were not explicitly selling it as anything other than a dictation product. Acting on the general public's expectation that a voice product would do navigation as to well. None of that arrogance of "Build it and they will come and hand over their first borns for every upgrade." Somebody in management obviously has the smarts and knows what it takes. Me like, me like. That's more than I can say for Lernout & Hauspie. 30,000 man-years of linguistic data be damned - get a heebieGB running the show in a clueless miasma, and all the depth and breadth of technology that you can summon up adds up to nothing. But I digress. This should be interesting to watch. Lernout & Hauspie has a vast array of technologies across a wide cross spectrum (whose intrinsic value is zero if it doesn't "translate" <g> into something saleable). But Dragon delivers, and obviously knows how to deliver; and eventually will need to match Lernout & Hauspie and IBM in terms of breadth. One thing the market makes clear again and again, however, is that it values the capacity to deliver more highly than general promise, and goes crazy when you combine the two (bless you, crazies!). No slips between cup and lip. I was intending to nibble after the IPO, but now I think I'll take a hefty bite. And enough time to decide whether to reallocate some Lernout & Hauspie into Dragon. Also keeping an eye on their tie-in with AOL. I'm willing to bet that the next version of their, AOL's, html based version-xyz pap will have voice built in. A navigational teaser at the very least. That's 18+ mill being steered into the Dragon's mouth. Lernout's translation revenues (the "general promise" I'm not yet ready to write off) are a ways off and for the next couple of years - this is it. Dragon is catching up in the embedded area and the trickle dollars LH is getting from this will shrink in relative terms within a growing market given their current execution. In voice, I expect Dragon will be the market darling for the immediate future - 6-12 months. How will Dragon affect the price of Seagate stock, if at all? Probably not at all? What is the value of Veritas on Seagate's books? oh well... mano, whose almost-carpal-ed elbow is heaving a sigh of relief. ps: they seem to have tweaked other things as well - it works fine with 64megs with other apps open. this wasn't the case earlier. haven't tried it on NT yet. pps: my next klondike expedition is into mp3 country - and working on the dictum that nothing succeeds like half-knowledge and tinkering <g> i'm looking at putting all my CDs on a hard drive. any guru's who've done that and feel like sharing some pointers?