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Technology Stocks : WAVX Anyone? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Trippi who wrote (6974)	5/23/1999 7:05:00 AM
From: Oliver Hahn	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 11417

Thankyou, all, for being civil. I have done some more searching, and have further refined my skepticism. I finally found some numbers on product shipments: "Lee, Massachusetts-based Wave Systems, which trades on the Nasdaq OTC bulletin board, has been working on its technology for 11 years and the Hauppauge agreement reflects the first time a Wave product will reach the consumer. Hauppauge will ship some 30,000 video cards that include Wave Systems technology, a Wave spokesman said." nscp.snap.com It is nice to see a start, but this is a far cry from expectations of shipping 3-5 million chips by the end of this year. There is no time frame set, so I would assume this means a total run of 30,000, then wait and see if there is any interest (other assumptions about this can be made, of course, YMMV). You can criticize me for lack of vision, but I think there is also a marked lack of vision on this board of what it takes to produce 3, 5, or 100 million chips. I have also looked into many of the partnerships that are given so much ballyhoo. Of the product makers, ITE and SMS don't even acknowledge WAVX on their pages. For HAUP, they have an optimistic press release but only the above numbers regarding actual product. These are the folks who would actually be making the silicon and boards, and if they are expecting huge shipments it should be in banner writing at the front of their web pages and cluttering every news release distributor out there. And we must remember that the WAVX model is to take a small slice of a huge number of transactions, so without a huge installed base there is nothing of value. Ok, so tell me about the tip of the iceberg, and I will tell you that the iceberg will melt fast at these spending levels and very modest beginnings to getting a revenue stream. As for Atmel, Sun, HP, and Sarnoff, these are all partnerships promising what is now vaporware. It is easy to say, "Oh yeah, we'll investigate adding that feature." I don't put much value in such things until samples are being shown, though I gather this is a minority opinion. TheGlobe is offering what appears to be a software only implementation, which brings up the question of why this needs to be in hardware anyways. But I am not interested in discussing why it is preferable to have it in hardware, I am willing to accept that. So how can I possibly discuss expenses and earnings for a "R&D" company? R&D is traditionally spent with a concrete plan on how to recover those costs (that's the now $60 million hole to which I refer--I can see that there is no debt, just a _lot_ of paid in capital). Where is the plan against which we can evaluate progress? If there are to be 3 million chips shipped by Christmas, there should be production goals for each quarter, a discussion of the distribution channel and how to prevent over stuffing, etc. ad nauseum. Maybe this is nuts and bolts, but it takes some pretty mundane nuts and bolts to make a Ferrari. So, snackman, I am really not as smart as you hoped. Anyways, these guys are only spending a small fraction of their losses on R&D, maybe we should call them a Conceptualizing Company. I apparently hit a hot button with Steve Sprague. I guess I should have been more clear that my first concern was this business of making loans to corporate officers. This is an "R&D" company, not a bank. That's what I call trashy. And nobody mentioned Michael Sprague (Steve never bothered me). Ok, I will leave off the family connections, it just struck me as suspicious after reading about the loan. Weby, I enjoyed your comment: If you don't like the lack of heat -- find another kitchen Oliver