To market, to market, to get a fat nothing

I was going to go back an address an aspect of the R. J. Falkner report on REFR, when I found something peculiar. As of noon Eastern, the website is gone and replaced by a "temporarily out of service" notice.

This may mean a lot of things or perhaps nothing at all, but we'll keep a watch on it.

In the meantime, we'll go out on a limb and trust N. Dixon's recounting of the Falkner report for the subject of the markets SPD is/will/hopes to someday participate in.

Flat Glass: very general and redundant with many of the specific products mentioned afterwards, so we'll set it aside for now.

Automotive rear-view mirrors: This market was captured quite thoroughly in the mid 90's by Gentex. Years later, Harary tried to downplay the defeat by declaring the market too small to be worth pursuing(!) Nevertheless, as with old licensees gone inactive, old market long since lost never get dropped from SPD's "potential".

Electrochromic mirrors: Apparently this is there to suggest that Gentex has only a very small part of the market, and that there's plenty of room for SPD to muscle in. Of course that flies in the face of Harary's "too small" declaration, but since when has consistency mattered here?

Automotive sunvisors: Never mind, apparently, that no government is going to allow material that defaults to dark on the front windshield.

Flat panel displays: This one is a real throwback, to the days when laptops largely had monocolor displays and widespread active-matrix LCD was still a pipe dream. LCD has come a long way since then. And SPD?

Eyewear (Prescription, Non-Prescription, Adjustable): They're still holding on to that one regardless of how thorough a failure the Vision-Ease experiment was.

Aircraft Windows: Covered.

The theory is that REFR only requires a very small amount of headway in any one of the above markets to be an instant success and destroy the shortsellers in its stock.

But if that were so, then what does it say about REFR's inability over the course of four decades to accomplish such a trivial-sounding task?