I think the future of ASICMINER now is really not in their own hands anymore, but depends on the competitors. We now have a vague timeline for Gen 3 chips (how "Gen 3" they are is up for debate); they will probably ship in March or April (providing Friedcat keeps to his promises). This is a huge amount of time in the Bitcoin world... if any competitors were to release a comparable product that actually shipped and was reliable, 1 to 2 months before ASICMINER gets finished, Friedcat is done for. I really have no idea why he sat on his ass after 'winning' Gen 1, but there you go. I'm not even sure who buys miners anymore when the difficulty is jumping so fast, if we could just go back to owning 10-15% of the network and getting good dividends every week, I would be more than happy. Focus on making good hardware and mining instead of packaging all this stuff, shipping it out, customer support, etc.