Paul Kedrosky’s evisceration of Dell (earnings report), and a hard hitting report from Cowen & Company tech strategist and a long time pal Arnie Berman made me thinking about all the disappointments that are cropping up all over the place.
Arnie, in his latest report Product Cycles Produce Less points out that the technology investors were feeling peckish because they thought new product cycles were going to boost the fortunes of many players.
The key categories responsible for this confidence: notebook PCs, flat panel televisions, wireless handsets, iPods and other mobile audio and video devices, Microsoft’s Vista operating system, next generation gaming platforms, and carrier spending on broadband projects and 3G infrastructure. Approaching the halfway mark of 2006, only wireless handsets has not experienced a setback — either in the form of a delay or a financial disappointment
Come on Arnie, why you be bubble-hater? He suggests good times will roll in 2007.
“…thinking about all the disappointments that are cropping up all over the place.”
YouTube? 😉
Austin, feeling a little slow this morning… explain .. you tube is going gangbusters – both in getting free users and spending vc dollars.
In all honesty I just latched on to one thing that made me think of YouTube — something so blatantly part of the 2.0 Bubble that I’m continually miffed by how people are throwing around 8$ mil here, 15$ mil there for a company whose traffic has been largely driven by piracy. I know you’ve said the same thing before (http://gigaom.com/2006/03/07/you-tube-growing-up/) but I don’t see YouTube being able to go from piracy to legit content distributor — think Napster.
Not only that, but it increasingly seems that the content owners don’t want to deal with YouTube — it’s just the script kiddies with TV tuners in their PCs.
Take, for example, the recent CSPAN event with Steven Colbert at the White House Correspondents Association. CSPAN pulls the copyright infringement card then turns to Google and publishes the same video for free. Why? While I can’t say for sure, part of me would like to assume it’s because the people in power (at least at CSPAN) have more faith in Google than they do a random video hosting site that gained mainstream notoriety from an SNL skit posted illegally.
Take a look at the Alexa charts for YouTube and find anything that even remotely compares. They’re use of contributed content and content embedding (piggyback on MySpace while you can!) was a phenomenal move. The question is can they take all this VC money and get anywhere with it — can they get to a point of profitability? Anyone can launch a service that guzzles insane amounts of bandwidth, but how can one capitalize — in an intelligent way — on the users of said service?
Again, just imho 🙂
hey austin,
gotcha. i can say this – stay tuned for more to come from where the first you tube post came from. i have to admit, you tube is atleast growing, while some of the other ones are not even growing as rapidly as that. so you have a situation there which is not sustainable.
I agree!
will the “”NEW DELL”” be the next Level3 carrying YouTube Traffic??? IBM, DELL, Intel…that was the Ole School! Now, Akami, MySpace, Vonage, YouTube come out of nowhere…
skibare
Wireless Headsets are doing fine? Well we’re doing OK thank you very much but did you see what happened to Plantronics when they released earnings last week. Ticker PLT.
It’s cold out there. For May.
The Dells of the world need Vista. Michael Dell should be liberally applying his moth to Bill Gates dick in the hopes that it will make the software ship sooner.
Thanks for the post. Paul Kedrosky’s translation of Dellese is great. Speaking of Dell Hell, it has been of late for Dell stockholders. I’ve posted a two-year stockchart of Dell on my site – http://www.writingup.com/blog/investing
I agree to some degree, but Dell would have tripped much sooner than this if not for the HPQ merger. See my commentary on this on my blog at http://www.montysbox.typepad.com.
Also, wireless handsets have a huge set of dissapointments coming soon. The CAGR rate in the US can’t support all the players in the market today, data adoption is not ramping fast enough and there are too many MVNO’s out there.