Random Thoughts

Seems to me that an $11.7M exclusive license deal with Johnson & Johnson for human medical apps, with the potential for ongoing royalties on commercial products, and an increasing annual license maintenance fee, is a pretty tremendous start to 2005.



Sure looks like the customer must be happy with the work Microvision has done on their Laser Printer Engine to award a third contract to the company to keep development going forward.



People lack the basic ability to connect the dots. Seems like folks have trouble thinking for themselves and depend on analysts(!) to tell them what things mean, or if something is significant or not. It's interesting to me that MVIS stock would trade for less today than it did before the announcement of the partnership with JNJ. Now, we've had a pretty lousy couple of days in the market. And I admit I am far from an impartial observer in this case. But I think you have to be a special kind of stupid to decide to unload your MVIS shares after this deal with JNJ. Clearly, this is just the tip of the iceberg and would have to be seen as pure upside since the thrust of the company remains image display -- image capture opportunities, particularly for medical applications, have to be seen as icing on the cake. $11.7M worth of icing, just for starters.



I think people just don't get it. They don't get what Microvision is all about. They don't grasp the idea that we hold the key to a mind-boggling number of large market opportunities. They don't understand that enormous, deep-pocketed customers continue to come to Microvision for help resolving visualization bottlenecks -- in places where displays or cameras (or laser printers) need to be smaller, lighter, brighter, higher-resolution, and on and on.



But there are some folks who do get it and what has happened is we have seen the whole picture at once. Mobile data transfer rates that are increasing exponentially. Huge revenue opportunities for cell phone companies are associated with the transfer of high resolution video content, as evidenced by the 'Super 3G' standard consortium that was recently reported. 2" LCD screens are ubiquitous but unable to provide a compelling mobile web user experience, particularly for HDTV content. There's the relentless urge to make mobile devices smaller and smaller -- and it's only made more difficult to satisfy by the need to have a large-sized display.



All of this adds up to just one thing, and it's inescapable:



The virtual display, owned in its entirety by Microvision and its shareholders, is literally the only solution to resolving this visualization bottleneck. We don't want bigger LCD panels in our pockets. We don't want to unfold some floppy OLED panel and have the guy next to us reading over our shoulder on the train. We need personalized, private, virtual displays that deliver high-resolution content to us and only us - in a form factor that can be as small as any device could need to be.



But don't ask some 'research director' about this. They don't get it, although they are paid to. I have no idea what these people are thinking or how they measure opportunities. I don't get where they think the world is moving to if it isn't a global pervasive mobile internet, and all of the opportunities that that represents.



It's just crushingly obvious, to those of us hip-deep in MVIS shares at least. The rest of the world will come along eventually.



We own the future, indeed.