Nick
There should be no reason for a public lynching. You have stated pretty clearly what has always been the ultimate unknown in this drama.... the ultimate position of end users in the end game. And, of course, initially many if not most of the market will take the cheap and easy way out. The question is how that cheap and easy is framed by the journalists and THE LAWYERS.
Security is an insurance cost. The machine insurance and the data insurance have costs either way. You may well be right that the uptake is going to be sloggish at best, but you may also be wrong. There are a lot of pressures to improve both system security and the appearance of system security -- pulls and pushes.
Military security
liability issues growing
slow growth of e-commerce until ID theft fear diminishes
Policy enforcement
DRM
Wavoids problem is not the long term adoption or ubiquity. Our problem is first ROI of the burn rate and then earning money in $40 million dollar chunks to support dollars per share in earnings. half a chunk gets you to 50 cents or double digits so the crucial question is where do we get 20 million dollars above the break even license fees. Well, that depends on whether "dollars not pennies per unit": means 2 dollars or 12 dollars. NOBODY has anything but guesses at this point including Dell and Wave.We were told that there was SERIOUS INTEREST from some potential clients.
My point is that with an enterprise base of 100 million machines and one or two percent producing 2 million times 10, while your assesment made me concerned....I have to believe that even minimal uptake SIGNIFICANTLY raises both the share price and the ability of the company to continue to grow... and that's without Awk's numbers which rely on a significant uptake of the whole system by a million or so trusted drive users at a full upgrade of $50 a machine.
We won't know the numbers until 2008, but we should be able to projecta more or less than multi=million dollar uptake by enthusasm of the press, the adoption by other OEMs, and the progress of the other parts of the system.
As usual, the real numbers will almost certainly be better than the bashers and less than the KaBoomers, but there is absolutely no reason to think that growth of revenue shouldn't accellerate to breakeven and beyond based on even a small fraction of what will be a 100 million machines plus market in a year or so......especially when one considers that the industry leaders adopted the standard not for secureities sake, but to profit from opportunities it presented for DRM,web services, and expanded markets. The glass IS getting to the half full place where we can all be optimists even if pessimism is a hard habit to break. In any case, this is not a lynching, because I think you have asked the most critical question...What will the adoption curve really look like a year from now?
AI
