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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: terrapin who wrote (5785)	4/7/1999 10:32:00 PM
From: Ronald C. Vinyard	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10081

Melancholy round of drinks, indeed. I think its time to start takin some serious stock in this stock...I would like to start some dialog about the REAL potential of the Magic, and not just our hopes and dreams.... 1) Dr. Markman's well-known reluctance to hype the stock is well and good, BUT... with no announcements forthcoming in re deals, etc, one might assume that none are in fact forthcoming... And while I understand his strategy in re: no subsriber numbers, I have to believe that if those numbers were knocking his socks off he'd say SOMETHING. 2) With no announced progress in the supposed Telco trials, can one assume that there is in fact any progress? We could assume that a) Portico has not reached a level of reliability sufficient to go forward, or b) the telco's are not convinced of the marketability of the product itself. 3) This perhaps the most serious question... where are the revenues going to come from? Given the numbers in the annual report, revenues must increase approximately 100-fold just to achieve break-even. Are revenues going to be substantially augmented by Quest? by Intuit? by the agent technology? what?? Must it all come from Portico? Despite all the favorable talk, Virtual Assistants still don't seem to be taking the country by storm. Do we have here a beautifully designed, feature rich mouse-trap that is unfortunately unattractive to mice? 4) Without achieving a very dramatic increase in revenues, short term (forget long-term) financing of the company's operations will become very problematic, very fast. Survival beyond the end of 1999 is questionable. And none of the partners (read Microsoft) has come forward with any cash infusions. Why? I'm still very long, but am growing more skeptical with each day of no news. I hope no one reads this as anything but an attempt to get some serious discussion going (some skeptics here have been scathed for having doubts). Or maybe I'n just needlessly fretting? -rv