It's time for a review: <Will CDMA succeed in Los Angeles [at last]?
How is CDMA going in Hong Kong, Korea, Trenton? Do people like it?
Will China be the biggest CDMA market?
What technical developments are going on?
Has Nextwave Telecom bid too much in PCS spectrum auctions?
Will notebook computers with built in CDMA phone take the world by storm?
Will you get rich from CDMA and Qualcomm?
Related topics: Eudora - the email you are probably using
Globalstar - the satellite phone system>
CDMA rules the world with GSM shrinking rapidly in market share. I use the words to describe the air interfaces, not the upstream legacy hardware.
But China is still a work in progress, with China stupidly pursuing their TD-SCDMA scheme which is a technological blind alley even though they have some pretty good economies of scale, though even 1.3 billion people isn't much of the total 6 billion on the planet.
Nextwave did NOT bid too much for spectrum in the 1996 C block auction and they are still dining out on the proceeds, developing OFDM technologies and associated technologies such as Wi-Fi.
Mini notebook computers like the swarms of PDAs are gaining ground, but laptops are a long way from having CDMA as a standard component. Wi-Fi is more or less ubiquitous in them.
What prompted me to post was I checked up on Eudora and it is off and running under the wing of Mozilla, with QUALCOMM having donated half a dozen employees to help make it happen. Yay!! Much better than donating some money to the symphony orchestra or baseball stadium. Cyberspace is where It's happening.
Check it out! eudora.com
It is now quite possible that we will all be using Eudora in years to come. Firefox has boomed in market share. Gmail is excellent, but annoying in some respects.
I still think email will form the core of what people do in cyberspace with a lot of other things nucleating around it. Email can be a LOT more than just sending messages to other people.
Meanwhile, Globalstar is in a battle for survival as the constellation dies and the 2 year gap before the next one is ready ticks by slowly and painfully. Unfortunately, the management of Globalstar did NOT take the opportunity to get the marketing right before the constellation got into trouble, though they had years to do so [about 4].
There is plenty of room for hope, but shareholders will suffer more dilution than they needed to to get funds for the next constellation, as it's now seen as a high risk venture rather than a slam dunk, which it would have been if marketing was done right 4 years ago.
In the last couple of days, the legal process has beaten QUALCOMM around the ears, with the halo well-slipped. The President of the USA declined to intervene, and a judge read the riot act in no uncertain terms. A bad scene, following other judicial failures by QUALCOMM too. It's a lose, lose, lose situation, despite hubris by the legal teams who obviously had not a clue what they were doing. There are plenty more opportunities to lose coming up.
I am NOT expecting QCOM to have a market capitalisation of $1 trillion any time soon, if ever. The opportunities have been poured down the gurgler. The litany of failure is lengthy. Yes, there are some bright spots, but downloading silly games on BREW doesn't make $1 trillion.
Something great like the Qi [Mq's swanky new cybercurrency] is needed. That would take some imagination, which seems to be in short supply these days. Eudora could have been bigger than Google with the right imagination. It became an also-ran. It could yet be worth $15 trillion or $20 trillion done right. Which I hasten to add is NOT what QUALCOMM would own. That is the value of what can be created. That's only $4000 per person [not counting 1 billion people]. It might be worth more like $100 trillion if it's done really well.
Mqurice |
