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 Technology Stocks : Nokia Corp. (NOK)

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To: Eric L who wrote (6901)1/20/2012 3:20:32 PM
From: Maurice Winn2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) of 8775
 
EricL, as he did way back in the 1970s, Steve Jobs got right onto the right thing at the right time. The iPhone and iPad caught the Zeitgeist while others were still blundering around with 1990s cellphone mentality.

But the presentation of the battles as gigantic contests between worthy opponents is out of date. Can you name the worth pencil manufacturers battling it out for supremacy? Bic is still big in ball points and I can remember a time when having a fountain pen instead of a dip pen was very impressive, and when ball points came in, they were amazing. I had a circular slide rule which was very cool compared with the straight ones which ran off the end. I was there and bought one when electronic calculators came in and my Unitrex amazing scientific calculator cost me over 100 pounds in Tottenham Court Road in 1974. Onehunga Borough Council the year before had put a guy on the job for a week of buying a large electronic calculator.

iPhones are the Unitrex of 2012.

Cyberphones are a few bits of plastic and glass and silicon in the form of chips. They don't actually cost anything.

Motorola sold analogue phones for $thousands in the 1990s. Functionality has gone exponentially parabolic without apparent asymptotic limits. So the prices have stayed high. But in the end, the marginal cost of production will dictate the price. The behemoth era of vast cash flows will end. Apple will be the last one. Nokia will not regain any glory at all. Casio make calculators. Nokia might make cyberphones.

The human genome is right now undergoing a similar revolution and one of my investments [Complete Genomics] is being smashed as a result.

There is still a long way to go to get mobile Cyberspace everywhere for everyone, but the process is well under way. Even Qualcomm has swarming competitors ripping margins apart on chips, having licensed all comers.

The current cyberphone contests are not between two individual players, it's an all in together contest. Saying Android is not fit to compete seems a bit silly. It obviously is.

When all that Anita [tm] functionality is included and prices are low, we might start to think the industry has reached the pencil and calculator stage of competition. So I'm not denying there is a lot of competition still to be hand and $billions of profit made. But it could happen quite quickly and probably will since so many people and $billions are all competing to get a piece of the action.

Mqurice
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