Naw, Ruffie is just making sure that everybody understands that QCOM is not only willing to wage a pervasive and relentless PR campaign of truths, half truths and obfuscations -- see Bux as Onceinalifetime on RB post close to 150 posts in 3-4 days -- but it is also willing to use the legal system aggressively.
One only has to look at the how farcical the effort was to turn a straightforward 1994 cross-licensing agreement between QCOM and IDC -- both feeding off the same deep-rooted and heavily-practical spread spectrum tradition in the military-industrial complex -- into a sale of patent rights by IDC at an early stage of the commercialization of spread spectrum technology. Duh! QCOM won the uncontested race to develop 2G narrowband CDMA. Does that necessarily mean that it owns 3g wideband CDMA especially the version that layers on top of TDMA/GSM, the global defacto standard with 85% of the global market? Of course not.
With that kind of stock price (read: currency) giving it the worst kind of licensing legitimacy, one can understand why a real substantial risk for a US company with a great engineering tradition like QCOM is for the lawyers and PR hacks to take over especially now that it has removed the R&D and manufacturing feedback loops that used to anchor QCOM even though, by all objective measures, it was a mediocre manufacturer of infrastructure and handsets with a marketing department that couldn't generate any kind of scale.
There is nothing new here. This is an old, tiresome and predictable corporate behavior pattern by companies that have invariably suffered by sacrificing the long-term for the short-term. QCOM differs only in that it has the stock currency now to try prove that it is the exception to that rule in an environment where large technology companies are becoming more adept at coming to terms with small companies and startups.
In much the same way that Cybor is the controlling law in patent litigation today, the Motorola statement about QCOM still holds: How can QCOM expect others to respect its IPRs when it can't even respect other people's IPRs? Nortel summed up the past, present and the future of global broadband perfectly when it said after a particularly heated conference in 1998: "We all know how to respect each other's IPRs, we've been doing it for the last 100 years."
The interesting thing to watch, almost in slow motion, is the fragmented patterns that emerge when one strips off the artificial and transparent layers of pugnacious legalisms and frantic PR machinations. You actually end up looking at an almost desperate, almost maniacal claim on the inspiration kernel that drives the invention or creative process involved in anything related to CDMA now and to quote one zealot, 'ever.' Already, that autarchic attitude has created a natural system of rewards and punishments in a global industry where there is a symbiotic relationship between manufacturers and carriers.
Paraphrasing Picasso, minor engineers and scientists "borrow" from other engineers and scientists, great engineers and scientists "steal" from the gods.
Gus
Notes:
Some maintain that Qualcomm's achievements say more about hype and advocacy than any technological advantage. "They have a legal team that threatens people who come up with conclusions they don't like," said Bruce Lusignan, a Stanford University engineer whose criticisms have provoked scrapes with Qualcomm.
washingtonpost.com
Bruce Lusignan, Professor, Stanford University
Bruce talk illuminated the fact that CDMA has some complexities and drawbacks making it less competitive in terms of net capacity than competitiors to Ericsson in recent years wanted us to believe. His studies showed that so called exotic amplitude control mechanisms are needed to be able to allow for some fading, while TDMA easily withstands this, and instead can utilize amplitude control to multiply the number of users in a cell by reusing airspace. CDMA has basic limitations in that the number of users is related directly to a minimum signal to noise ratio, aside from fading. All in all CDMA will give you a higher level roof but that there are a number of problems that you have to deal with before you reach that level of airspace. Bruce said that when the studies were performed Ericsson was not a sponsor, so it all sounds pretty believable. A confusing distinction (at least for Europeans) was made between TDMA and GSM.
it.kth.se |
