Sprint's core postpaid business has been gradually shrinking as seen by a net loss of approximately 3 million customers during the first nine months of 2009. They have increasingly been focused on the prepaid market with recent success in their $50 monthly unlimited prepaid rate plan. Their subsidiary, Boost Mobile offers prepaid services to nearly 6 million customers in the United States. Their recent acquisition of Virgin Mobile this summer for $483 million provides Sprint another 5 million prepaid customers. Let's not forget their other 48 million subscribers. Sprint has about $20 billion in debt, 2.8 billion shares outstanding and with the recent price of $4.00/share; Google could pick up the company for a 25% premium. This would only be about $14 billion in Google stock with Google assuming their debt. At Google's share price, that's only 7% of their outstanding shares. (See Exxon's recent acquisition of XTO, all stock deal of $31 billion). Google would have the spectrum, WiMax/4G, and access to Sprint's R&D. This is the fastest way they can become a carrier. The open Android OS would still be available to other handset manufacturers and market acceptance would be a result of who creates the better user experience.

By building upon their heritage in personal information management devices, Palm has extended good functionality to popular websites that appeal to business users with the new Palm Pre. I believe this is the last Hoo-Haa for Palm as they have struggled for several years (stock was $1.50 in December). They redesigned the operating system, WebOS, from the ground up and many industry observers like the new user interface. It makes use of MEMS to support tilt like the iPhone. It received a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. The browser is based on WebKit and developers who know XHTML, Javascript, XML and Cascading Style Sheets should be able to develop for the device without learning any new languages. Palm has many loyal users. Their carrier partner, Sprint has experienced a severe drop in subscriber growth recently. So you have two weak players making another go at it. If Verizon gets a hold of it, that would help it flank AT&T's iPhone. We're not out jumping in the stock yet, it went from $3 to $6 in a couple of days, mostly a short-covering rally.

Sprint is merging its WiMax Xohm business with Clearwire in a $3.2 billion investment backed by Google, Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable and others in a move to save the technology in the U.S. The deal originally fell apart last November but we thought some investors would come forward. Craig McCaw is bringing together some of his early day pioneers such as John Stanton (from Western Wireless, later became VoiceStream, then T-Mobile) and Dan Hesse of Sprint. So far Sprint has only shown it can lose money and faces rapid extinction to Verizon and AT&T. WiMax has already lost momentum to spectrally efficient LTE (4G), I'm still not sure they can gain market traction.  The real winner is Clearwire and a small pay day for McCaw. Google wants to ensure it has a home for Android handsets and put up $500 million. That's plenty of Zeros for the venture, but I don't think they'll win.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire are abandoning their plans for a nationwide WiMax network that would have reached 100 million people by the end of 2008. The departure of Sprint's CEO, Gary Forsee presumably complicated the closing of the transaction. This is a real blow to the burgeoning ecosystem being created around WiMax. There were great expectations from the recent WiMax Forum with regards to Sprint's Xohm service that was expected to be available in mid-2008. Perhaps Sprint's investors want to see them improve their overall revenue picture before launching down a $3 billion+ CAPEX road. This is a major setback to Craig McCaw's Clearwire. One option under consideration was a spinoff of Sprint's WiMax business and merging it with Clearwire. I'm not sure Clearwire can make it on its own because estimates of infrastructure build out costs continue to increase (from $600M to over $1 billion). Sprint also has been working to get things going with Google, although nothing has been launched. Sprint is without a leader and clearly that affects their ability to get strategic deals completed. Don't be surprised if other companies in the supply chain come with investment money to help Clearwire survive - Intel, Motorola and Samsung to name a few. The shakeup of the weak WiMax players is well underway.