2/ Craig McCaw said to me more than once: “Pioneers often get arrows in the back.” Sometimes forces in the business and engineering worlds are perfectly aligned to create financial success and sometimes that is not the case. Being first is not always best. Sometimes it is best.
3/ Greenfield overbuilding of a facilities based network is a hard knock life. Watching what DISH does and what happens is a great way to learn. "You can observe a lot just by watching" said Yogi Berra. fiercewireless.com/operators/dish…
4/ “Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.” Charlie Ergen google.com/amp/s/25iq.com…
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The best place to understand how and why Microsoft structured the IBM PC relationship as it did is to read the books that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote. The most relevant chapter in Paul's book is chapter ten. Other books (including three biographies) on are often fictional.
2/ Paul's account of what happened between IBM's arrival in Seattle during the summer of 1980 and the launch of the IBM PC in the fall of 1981 is in Chapter 10: erenow.net/biographies/id… They had learned about the value of a standard during its time selling software for the Altair
"On June 30, 2021, the Company held marketable securities valued at $349,593,000, including net pretax unrealized gains of $269,347,000"
2/ "As of June 30, 2021, the investments were concentrated in just nine companies. The Company is not a smaller version of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Instead, it hopes to be a significant software company while it also operates its Traditional Business."
3/ What portfolio managers would have a portfolio of just nine stocks?
"Daily Journal's robust portfolio gains were a product of positions in Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, and Posco." google.com/amp/s/www.busi…
1/ In July of 1980 (1) Bill Gates Sr told me about Microsoft's business and (2) IBM made its first visit to Seattle (July 21) to discuss "Chess." People who want to understand what happened after that should read interviews and books written by Bill, Paul and other people there.
2/ An IBM PC chronology:
July 21, 1980: IBM calls Bill Gates asking for a meeting.
August 21, 1980: IBM officially gives Project Chess a green light.
August 22, 1980: IBM meets with Kildall and is not happy with prices and attitude.
August 1980: QDOS 0.11 is shipped by SCP
3/ "Late September": IBM asks Microsoft to create an OS for the PC recalls Paul
September 29, 1980: Late October: Microsoft *licenses* QDOS.
September 30: Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Bob O'Rear make a proposal to IBM.
November 6: Microsoft and IBM sign a software contract.
The unit economics of dense cellular deployments is something I've been working on since I was on the board of directors of a base station startup in 1998.
2/ The company we invested in was RadioFrame, which developed pico and femtocell products. The business was sold to Motorola.
The biggest challenge is to make deployments profitable for the operator. There are other ways to serve customers at lower radio frequencies.
142 GHz!
3/ Another business assuming line of sight and no rain or fog problems was Terabeam. I saw the first demo of the service in the 1990s. George Gilder proclaimed "The Terabeam Era" had arrived.
1/ Why do cost overruns and delays happen? Because incentives are broken. The contractors don't see lower costs and on-time or early delivery as beneficial. They believe they will make less profit just as traditional space contractors did before SpaceX. breakingdefense.com/2021/08/adm-gi…
2/ "If you look at the way things are going right now, we're basically moving to a defense force that's more and more special forces. That's more and more rapid deployment. That's more and more machine learning fighting machine learning." joincolossus.com/episodes/51296…
3/ "I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.” Munger
"South Korea’s Hanwha an 8.8 per cent stake in OneWeb for $300m. Hanwha’s investment suggests a valuation of about $3.4bn for OneWeb." news.google.com/articles/CAIiE…
"Hanwha Systems, which makes Multi-Functional-Radar (MFR) technology, is looking to gain a foothold in the Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) antenna market by supporting Kymeta’s metamaterial-based antenna tech." satellitetoday.com/business/2020/…