Fishn
Some thoughts to add to your summary.
I've worried about competition for ten years. Crazy Larry asked me about "reverse engineering" the first time I talked to him about Wave almost ten years ago. I've always put as much or more emphasis on the POLITICAL complexity of building interoperability than the engineering part. Once the engineering problems have been solved, others can see the solutions and often resolve them much more quickly.
Much of the time spent has been spent by building the political consensus to develop the standard. This cuts both ways. Wave is the LEADER in the software technology. Wave has the teams who are expert in AMD and MSFT operating systems. The teams that have connected or made connection possible between Juniper, MSFT, Cisco. The teams that have worked with the teams from each of these companies to make it all work together. Those kinds of teams are primarily competed with in one of two ways
Buy of Team Leaders from the experts at Wave to build your own. Its no accident that Seagate hired a Wave VP.(I've always assumed that Willet and Thibideau worked there with Wave's cooperation and assistance. If you don't or can't hire away enough talent then you have to build something similar or different and change the standard.
SKS has been saying, but not clearly enough, that Wave works the standard. It's first mover advantage isn't like Visicalc or even Quicken, simply the first in business. It is more like realplayer or ethernet, or the standard use of a particular port which once baked into the system becomes very expensive to reproduce or displace with a different technology. It's why I asked SL the other day about VP.6 as a new technology that itself is a broad standard politically adopted by the industry.
Politically, is important. NEC is important not only because adds an OEM, but because it adds a Japanese OEM. I'm sure you've noticed that we've had trouble breaking into THAT market. Those firms work together and cooperate as well as compete.
Not to go on, but those RELATIONSHIPS are not reproduced overnight. The technologies have to be implemented by people and work rapidly. Perhaps the key point that hasn't ever been made is that technology can be reverse engineered to do something and that makes competition easy, but once the system ia up AND running then the potential competition has a much harder problem -- How do you reverse engineer the system so that you can sell the system and not single point solutions.
Everything is its opposite and now all the arguments that prevented Wave from selling point solution upgrades will be on the other foot as companies whether they be HP or Hitachi or Secude try to build and integrate a systemic solution to ERAS, EEE, ETS while Wave can move onto helping banks and health providers integrate trusted web solutions in vertical industries where Wave will establish dominance in Phase III.
Read SKS carefully when he talks about the importance of being the standard. He's been building mind share for a decade. If Wave executes now competition will have to displace an existing, working standard with an unknown set of at first, partial solutions. Wave's been there done that...It won't be easy for the competition whether it's a giant feared like Cisco and MSFT or a smaller Secude or McAffe or Infineon who has to build expertize in areas quite unlike their current expertize.
The key now isn't only the easy use of the term key management software, but the fact that Wave's total system is being INTEGRATED both within and between firms horizontally and vertically. The fears of Netscape being beaten by MSFT Explorer and the demise of thousands of small companies being eaten alive and out resourced when the Internet boom imploded are not really relevant nor is the Beta fight. They were point to point competitions not first mover technology systems deeply integrated as standards connecting with billions of nodes.
And even if I'm wrong -- after waiting in the desert for so long -- I'd be happy with half of the developing multi-billion dollar market for the next five years and I never forget the secure web services evolution that will come with it, and the lead Wave has there too with expertize in securing documents using the TPMs and whatever is happening in the huge huge market of EMBEDDED TPMs, casinos, cars, ATMs. This truly has just begun!!!
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