Dear Editor,
In regards to the latest and previous articles by Debra Wayne regarding Pocket Communications, as a former Pocket Communications employee (and I in no way represent the company or its interests), I would like to say a few things.
Pocket was to pay $1.4 billion dollars to the Federal Communications Commission with funding from an initial public offering and/or venture capitalist.
Here is a simple question for Mr. Robinson: “Would you pay $1.4 billion for a house that’s worth $350 million?” Apparently most of Wall Street didn’t want to buy that house, so why would you make a buyout offer of $1.5 billion? Sure, Mr. Robinson makes for interesting reading but enough is enough. If he has the money, he should show up at the bankruptcy court with a cashiers check for $1.5 billion otherwise it is time for him to step off his soapbox and go home.
Another note: A week or so before Pocket filed Chapter 11, Debra Wayne spoke with Pocket executives. Perhaps she was a little upset when the story broke a week later and she didn’t get the scoop during the interview. And maybe, some of that “disappointment” came through in her future articles. I think if she would have had less “Robinson spin” on the articles, she would have gotten more cooperation from Pocket.
I just wanted you to hear an opinion from one of the 55 employees no longer with Pocket.
Chris Stewart
Home won’t run via paging service
To the Editor:
Over-promise the benefit, presume the premise is valid and continue to underestimate the reader. That must be the rationale that supports the theme of the opening paragraph in “Paging goes home” (Dec. 22. 1997).
If the writer really believes that automatically turning appliances on and off is tantamount to “running a house by remote control,” maybe he should suspend his journalism career and start a home management company. Think of his selling proposition to the busy homeowner, who today is strapped with making all those on/off appliance decisions “on the fly,” rather than scheduling them in advance and skipping off to the coast with newfound leisure time and money.
How about some copy for his brochure: Run your entire house by remote control! Tired of waiting for the iron to warm up while you stand in front of it? Don’t trust the timers on your coffee pot, oven, VCR, computer and alarm clock? End the tedium, set yourself free and run your entire house by remote control with HomePage, the house management program from your electric company! No labor costs! No overhead! No decisions! No maintenance, repair or upkeep on anything in your home! Run your entire home by remote control! Get daily updates of your electricity usage! Buy our tracking package and we’ll even graph it and fax you a daily Flash Report, broken down by appliance/by function/by location, with pager notification of its arrival! And, with our HomePage Internet home page, you can do it all from the Web, right from the convenience of your own home-oops. Anyway, try it now!
Requirements: all new appliances.
Availability: Announced nationally, not available anywhere.
Price: More than you are willing to pay, until it’s cheap enough to give away.
It’s got “Can’t Miss!” written all over it, doesn’t it? Mobile Telecommunication Technologies Corp. has lots of good ideas, great products, and great people. But this announcement is another example of a technical capability trying in vain to create a big problem to solve. The business market may buy into the remote monitoring proposition, but automatic appliance switching as a proxy for running a house? That’s nothing to write (or page) home about.
Miguel Lecuona
marketing director
Nextel Communications
Houston, Texas
