Touchstone

To everyone who has written, unfortunately I have no explanation for, or understanding of, the decline in the stock. When faced with this inexplicable situation, I find some solace in 'The Law of Acclerating Returns' written by Ray Kurzweil, very briefly excerpted below. Now, how to align the shareholder value creation with the accelerating rate of progress improving Microvision's technology that has been demonstrated over the last 3 1/2 years (since the stock was in the $3 range) is a question that I will leave each of you to consider (for now).

I believe that this will turn around. I'm just sitting here, staying put, watching this. I believe that Microvision's technology, when coupled with the kind of operational excellence that a top-tier manager from GE will bring to the company, will prove to be incredibly valuable. It is not just Nomad for car mechanics. That is just a stepping stone, a proof of concept, leading towards full color models, with eyeglass form factors, Bluetooth, HDTV-resolution and all the rest.

The market says the future cash flow from all of Microvision's patents, partnerships and everything to ever come from the company is worth somewhere around $52M once the cash and LMRA asset is subtracted out. Fifty million bucks for the rights to every dollar generated by retinal scanning eyeglass displays, laser scanning surgical cameras, laser printer engines, laser bar code scanners, laser scanning picoprojectors, laser scanning HUDs for cars and airplanes, and on and on, til the end of time. Hard for me to reconcile the vastness of the opportunities with the minuteness of the market capitalization. Wow.

In any event, 2010 is sneaking up on us. Just about 3 years from now. MVIS is going to have to be very busy putting together the glasses and contact lenses that Kurzweil describes, methinks.

The Law of Accelerating Returns

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.

Full immersion visual-auditory environments will be available by the end of this decade [2010] with images written directly onto our retinas by our eyeglasses and contact lenses. All of the electronics for the computation, image reconstruction, and very high bandwidth wireless connection to the Internet will be embedded in our glasses and woven into our clothing, so computers as distinct objects will disappear.

The web will provide a panoply of virtual environments to explore. Some will be recreations of real places, others will be fanciful environments that have no "real" counterpart. Some indeed would be impossible in the physical world (perhaps, because they violate the laws of physics). We will be able to "go" to these virtual environments by ourselves, or we will meet other people there, both real people and simulated people. Of course, ultimately there won't be a clear distinction between the two.