Tero, I'm inclined to agree that major strategic blunders were the important issues. But there is the intangible X-factor which subtly sees some people consistently do the right thing and excel and others seem to be really good, but get things wrong even though they have excellent reputations. Think Irwin Jacobs and Lars Ramqvist for example. Which would you give $1,000,000 to do something really great? That's a rhetorical question, so no need to answer that.
Nokia for a decade has done everything right, though they have been unable to make the CDMA handsets a success. That doesn't mean they were wrong to try to do their own ASICs, just that it was like the world champions, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, etc boxing Cassius Clay, or like Gary Kasparov trying to beat Deep Blue at chess. They can easily remedy that by buying ASICs from Q! and maybe even the whole handset division.
Nokia was one of the first to buy the rights to use CDMA. They have succeeded brilliantly in handsets. Now their major challenge is to rapidly convert their marketing and stuff to CDMA. They should not take that task too lightly and so far are in failure mode. Their fall from grace could be spectacular. There are dozens of CDMA handset makers thrashing around in a low margin market. Nokia doesn't have any W-CDMA lock on Europe.
So, Nokia is the handset King, fully clothed in beautiful raiment but is having to rally the troops very quickly in the CDMA space going forward [to coin a phrase].
L M Ericcson is the nearly-naked King, who has acquired a figleaf via the infrastructure division of Mighty Q! Hurrying to regain dignity.
Lucent is the CDMA infrastructure champion and they have nothing but glory ahead [so far anyway] as WWeb orders flood in. They really got their strategy and execution right! [A shame about their handsets.]
Motorola is a shambles, though was early into CDMA and is doing okay there. Not great, but okay. Could recover very well and become a titan again with WWeb developments and CDMA expansion.
Nortel seems to be doing okay. A good journeyman in the CDMA space [not to make a cliche of the word].
Then there is Samsung which is doing very well in handsets and infrastructure and will be very big time in CDMA.
Philips made a charge at CDMA handsets, but crashed.
Plus swarms of others are competing and succeeding or failing in handsets and infrastructure. Sony gave up the QPE game.
Qualcomm, I suppose you now realize, is being very successful. Infrastructure and handsets aside, which to me were very disappointing - they should have succeeded. I don't buy the 'we were too small to get parts' argument. They is true, but great people overcome minor problems like having to form contracts for supply or being slightly disadvantaged on price compared with bulk buyers.
The only strategy which matters now is to put all bets on CDMA in WWeb and EARLY, not late, while keeping the GSM cash cow ticking over as long as possible. EDGE is never going to see the light of day. GPRS is going to be a minor bump in the landscape looking back from 2010. HDR seems set to be a major lump in the first half of the decade with cdma2000 [and clone] the zeitgeist from 2005 to 2010.
Motorola's cellphone failure seems to have been in execution rather than strategy [though Iridium was strategy = the wrong system design]. They failed in CDMA networks [well, didn't do very well and had significant glitches]. They failed in handsets with Mighty Q! rescuing them in Hong Kong when Motorola couldn't supply the world's first network which they built and which seems to have been of indifferent quality [at that time anyway].
If you or Nokia are putting much emphasis on GSM [other than as a smokescreen] you will be in big trouble. It'll make Motorola's crunch look like a smooth glide.
That's how I've placed my bets. All on WWeb, and sooner rather than later.
Maurice |
