Going For the One

Progress goes in one direction -- forward. Every step forward enables another step forward that requires the last as a prerequisite.

Every theme that we see expressed in personal technology today is just a leading indicator towards where things are headed. There will only be more connectivity, more immersion, more of the virtual, the augmented, the artificial.

Every time you hear about someone who's fallen off the map because they became so immersed in their game of Everquest, or World of Warcraft, and their whole lives have become consumed with their participation in a massively multiplayer online role playing game, realize that this is just the earliest stages of people allowing their online virtual lives to take on as much or more importance than their physical, real lives.

Every time you see someone with a Bluetooth earbud chatting away, realize that it is simply the current manifestation of the innate desire to become more intimately entwined with our technology and with one another.

It's relentless, the pace of change, of growth, of progress. Sometimes it's unsettling for people when they pause to consider some of the longer term ramifications of Moore's Law and Edholm's Law of Bandwidth when extended out 20, 30 or 50 years. Personally, I choose not to worry about stuff like being overtaken in creative ability by super-intelligent machines. My take on it all is just to use computers to enhance my abilities and my creativity and my global reach. Augment my capabilities so that I just use computers to do what I was doing anyway, just better, and faster and with a much broader audience.

The world of today is just the prerequisite to what we will see in the years to come. You couldn't have ambient intelligence and consumer augmented reality in the world of the 2010s without cell phone location-based services and RFID tags, such as they are today.

Everything is on its way to some place else. You, me, Microvision, the world of technology, and society itself. What's not yet possible today will become possible with a little more progress, a little more elbow grease, a little more applied genius.

The world is in a state of constant change. The question for investors is to ask how the world is changing -- what does the world need to achieve its next step? Through what method will we become more immersed, more connected, deeper into the worlds of the virtual and augmented?

I believe that Microvision's intellectual property will prove to be the critical infrastructure that enables the world of the 2010s. Tokman has stated that the goal of the company is to make their light-scanning platform indispensable. Necessary. The fundamental visual building block of the digital world as we will know it.

The technology, to anyone who has witnessed it first hand, is astonishing. To see high-resolution digital images hovering in space before you, with no screen anywhere, is an incredible experience. It is easy to see why Tokman believes the company's technology can become indispensable and can fundamentally change the way we do things.

Everything is on its way to some place else. And maybe, if we just put our shares in a safety deposit box for about 5 years, we may wake up one day to find that Tokman and the GE crew completely transformed the business of Microvision and developed breakthrough products that created unprecedented shareholder value from the technology that we all know has fundamental value far beyond its current price.

It's hard when your face is pressed up against the glass, watching every tick of the stock, waiting with baited breath for every announcement. It can feel like a long haul. But in just the last two months, the pace of change has been astonishing. The whole company has been re-orged. The executive team got a lot leaner. The Board is being upgraded with top talent. Everything is being aligned behind the vision that attracted shareholders to MVIS in the first place: the embedded architecture, Microvision-inside.

We have a pretty good idea where the world is heading. The world of the 2" screen, of the navigation system in the center console, the world before electronic eyewear, is not going to last much longer.