2/ I wrote a new briefing paper each time Bill Gates retreated to Hood Canal to read and think:
@stevesi writes: "The April 1994 ThinkWeek was my third and last. Bill devoted a good deal of time to writing his first strategic internet memo."
Business + internet was emergent!
3/ When Bill Gates/Craig McCaw invested in Teledesic in 1993 we had this crazy idea for a broadband "Internet in the Sky" composed of a constellation of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit. People thought we were NUTS, which was a signal that we were on the right track.
4/ It is hard for many people today to imagine that in 1993 to exchange messages with people electronically you may have used UUNET or Halcyon. Many people communicated by phone or voicemail. It was barbaric!
When WorldCom bought UUnet, in 1996 poop hit the fan. Telecom bubble!
5/ "The decision to put money into the Internet in 1994 was considered by many of my colleagues to be borderline insane. Most people said things like, The Internet is free; you can’t make money on that!" @pmarca
Few understand this. Seriously. Commercial internet born in 1993.
6/ May 26, 1995: Bill Gates publishes “The Internet Tidal Wave” memo in which he "repeated and amplified much of [the earlier] memo in a loftier and more intentionally external missive that would receive wider distribution and wide acclaim." The intended audience was external.
7/ April 1994: Yahoo founded.
May 1994: Microsoft Tiger server
~June 1994 I started helping Bill and Nathan write The Road Ahead
DEC • Wang • Prime • Tandem • Silicon Graphics • Sun • Atari • Osborne • Commodore • WordPerfect • Lotus • Ashton Tate • Borland • Lucent • 3Com • Banyan • Nortel •Novell • Motorola • AT&T (long distance business)
“When your sales slow down, its probably because of some horrible mistake you made a couple of years ago. By the time your sales go down, you’re dead, because it’s too late to do anything about it.”
Bill Gates said this in the mid 1990s but I've lost the source. Probably 1994.
“Novel has a commanding lead in networking. Apple is known for better ease of use. Lotus has captured the market’s imagination with Notes, and we have been slow to respond.”
Every beam of every satellite has a capacity limit. Beam capacity can grow but there's always a limit based on laws if physics. One way to ration that capacity is based on contention and another is to limit users in a beam. news.google.com/articles/CAIiE…
One way to increase the number of beams is to increase the number of satellites:
"SpaceX continued the deployment of its Starlink broadband megaconstellation May 4 with the second launch of 60 satellites in less than a week." spacenews.com/spacex-continu…
One way to increase the number of satellites (which creates more beams) is to use Starships which have a planned capacity of 400 Starlink satellites instead of 60 on a Falcon 9. news.google.com/articles/CAIiE…
Buffett, 90, and Munger, 97, will give me all I can handle tomorrow. My game plan is to channel my inner Bill Walton using obscure references early in the first half. That will cause inexperienced investors to avoid my thread. Then I mix in a few jokes. finance.yahoo.com/brklivestream/
One luxury I have in doing BRK play-by-play is no paid subscribers, advertising or content marketing. If I want to channel Bill Walton and tell jokes, I can. Of course, if I did have paid subscribers, sold advertising or peddled merch, I might still channel Walton and tell jokes.
"The reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, ‘My god, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?’ And he said, ‘Mister, I don’t sell to fish.’”
1/ Gwynne Shotwell: "The total addressable market for launch, with a conservative outlook on commercial human passengers, is probably about $6 billion. But the addressable market for global broadband is $1 trillion."
2/ Shotwell: "Starlink is best set up to serve rural villages and the rural population. We can do work in the city, but you can't put enough bandwidth down in a city to cover any sort of percentage of consumers in that cell." We want Starlink to look like consumer electronics."
3/ Shotwell; "We are definitely focused on consumer first. Not that we're not looking at enterprise markets — we definitely are. But the priority and emphasis are always on the consumer."
Consumer markets not served by fiber are a vastly bigger total addressable market.