Red Lenses

I'm no scientist, but the one thing that I took away from the time I spent trying to understand quantum physics is that it's all about perception. The state that something's in is undetermined until it is observed by somebody.

Seems to me that the stock market is a lot like quantum physics in that way. The value of a company is just what it is perceived to be by the investing public. There's the trouble. The public is unimaginative. The public doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about what things might be like in 2 years or 5 years or 20 years. The public seems to think about whatever arcane verbiage comes out of the Fed or the price of oil or God knows what.

So far I have been unable to find a correlation between the price of oil and the likelihood of continued design wins for Microvision's technology. It's just not there. And, all the volatility that we experience as MVIS investors is just noise. Here at $5, are the company's patents and technology and prospects really worth just half of what they were the last time the stock was at $10? As I see it, the company has only grown more valuable and more likely to achieve some pretty stellar growth in the years ahead. But, the stock price is the reality. It just seems silly to me. But prices are set by dull, unimaginative beaurecrats and lemming-like individual investors who are unable and unwilling to take chances, use insight or the part of the brain dedicated to foresight. It's all just reaction. Forensics. The past tense. Twitching. Action with no reason.

I've made my bet and I'm at peace with the price volatility. My interest in the company and the technology has always been about where we might be around the end of this decade, the one that we're just a little more than half way through. I've written a lot about grid computing, geographic information systems, wireless bandwidth and all that stuff. And none of that stuff is going to go away. It's going to grow, and accelerate and enable. The question is, what is it going to enable? What do the next generations of cell phones look like? What do the next generation of mobile computing apps look like? How can what we see today inform a vision of the near future? What can what I've learned and experienced tell me about what I'm going to see come out of companies like Nokia, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Motorola?

Today there's picture phones. There's video phones. There's mobile TV. There's internet on phones. Sure seems constrained by the 2" screen doesn't it? But that huge limitation to the future profit potential of network operators, device manufacturers and service providers just doesn't register on the scale of the world the way a 25 vs 50 basis point move by the Fed does, or oil prices or the latest worry du jour. If people gave two seconds of thought to what the possible solutions are to the mobile device display bottleneck, Microvision's share price would explode. Because there literally is no other solution to delivering big screen content in a tiny form factor. Not to mention just how cool it is to reflect a light beam across your retina to create a virtual image that only you can see.

I'm not the smartest guy in the world but I know the future of this country and the world is in ever advancing technology. That's my world view and my understanding of things. Technological progress is relentless, and all consuming. It is what drives the economy and enables the high quality of life in this country.

I own MVIS stock because in a few years, every man, woman and child in the civilized world will own or interact with multiple 'MVIS inside' devices every day. Right now, the market as evidenced by the share price either doesn't agree with that, doesn't think about that or can't imagine that.

When the stock is tanking and everyone's pissed off about it, in reality you've got just three choices. Grin and bear it, load up, or unload. In this great country, the choice is yours.