Re: Your favorite 10 analog IC's

From: gwhite (gwhite_at_deadend.com)
Date: 02/18/05 

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:26:47 GMT

John Larkin wrote:
>
> On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 22:03:01 GMT, gwhite <gwhite@deadend.com> wrote:
>
> >The bottom line: The directive was to take a small 200 person company in Los
> >Gatos and build a $1 bil (or more) advanced radio communication system
> >nationwide in a period of about 1.5 years (maybe 2), and all the marketing and
> >revenue generating that must necessarily rapidly follow. No one can grow that
> >fast and be successful for any realistic amount of investment. The "plan" was
> >crazy and flawed at its root, despite certain executive management problems that
> >did exist during the massive network inventory over production.
> >
> >I think this ended up being about a $1.5 bil train wreck.
> >
> >>
> >> I think I actually saw a guy in a cafe using a laptop with a Ricochet.
> >> Once.
> >
> >It actually worked pretty well. A good technology got snuffed out by a crazy
> >plan.
>
> Cool; I love biz stories.
>
> But is/was there an actual money-making market for wireless internet
> connections? This neighborhood is full of WiFi cafes and all that, and
> even when it's free nobody is sitting and surfing, as far as I can
> see. People talk or read books or read newspapers in public places. I
> think the idea of surfing the net 24 hours a day is over.

The intial idea was not "surfing," although it could obviously be used for
that. At first, they thought the main customers would be businesses. It was to
be nationwide network (really covering all major metro areas, but not rural)
where a subscriber could connect anywhere anytime in the same manner.

For example, suppose a Sales Rep from San Diego was giving a presentation to a
potential customer in a conference room in Boston. The customer has a question
for which the Sales Rep has no local (Boston) information. The Sales Rep,
through VPN, can access the San Diego company servers just as if he/she is in
the San Diego office. The question is answered rapidly. Emails come right
through too, in the normal sense. There is no perceptual difference whether the
user is in San Diego, Boston, or Chicago O'Hare. The user keeps the computer on
standby, finds a moment to open it, and connects in under 10 seconds, the same
way everywhere. The same goes for when the business person goes to their hotel
room for the evening. They are completely insulated from any particular
connection issues of diverse hotels/motels. They can do the same thing for the
next day's sales visit.

That was an example of the mobile business user idea. Many business people
who--by the nature of their business--were on the road in a *single* metro area
absolutely loved the service. It was a very efficient comm link for them, which
they conveniently could move to the home office (or anywhere else) for the
evening, if desired.

Of course, part of the problem was the singular focus on business users. Many
non-business (consumer) users don't have access to DSL or Cable connections. Of
course, these areas are shrinking over time, but nonetheless there was and is
potential revenue from non-business users. The Ricochet connection allows a
home phone line to be dedicated to voice or fax. The idea that the home
consumer user is not physically tethered to a room or even a single neighborhood
could still have some value add even for folks that may not needing mobility
*often*.

Suppose a student shares a house with 7 others and share one phone line.
Ricochet allows independent rapid connectivity for the student, whether at home
or studying in the library at school with their laptop. Police and fire could
use data service too. In fact, *any* sort of data services could be supported.
It is up to the imagination of the *users*. The subscriber device simply needs
to be cheap.

Metricom Marketing had too narrow a focus imo. They actually began figuring out
what it took to break consumer resistance, and how to market Ricochet with some
test programs in the San Diego market. But it was too late--way too much debt,
not enough current revenues, and shrinking cash reserves caused creditors to put
the hammer down.

I also forgot to mention another practical problem with the nationwide plan of
building out the network. They tried to do it all over the country almost
simultaneously. There was not enough network building experience base for
Ricochet 2. Like any complicated process, it is nice to find all the process
hitches in a "test run" (smaller scale) before taking it to higher volume. That
is, I believe they should have built out the SF Bay Area system first because
this would help refine process issues and build personel experience base.
(Metricom was based in the SF Bay Area, so this seems geographically obvious.)
The technical network personel base can then take these learned process
improvements, and their practical learned experience, and diffuse that to
multiple metro areas as appropriate.

As it was, all mistakes were made everywhere, thereby multiplying the cost of
problems. The same goes for marketing, they needed to figure it out in the SF
Bay Area first, before incurring the error multiple of cost. They gave
themselves no chance of success. Executive staff, major investors, and the BoD
were in way over their heads, and it showed.

It was a rather spectacular wreck. To answer your question, I don't know if the
idea could have been ultimately successful. The users who did have it really
seemed to like it. I do know it was never given a reasonable (fair) chance of
discovery due to boneheaded unrealistic planning. If it were destined to fail,
it did not need to fail on that big of a scale.

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