I just don't think that it has the capacity for high-end technical innovation which the Q has demonstrated
They used to say the same thing about Apple during its heyday. The fact of the matter is it no longer makes sense for any one company to plan its projects on the assumption that it will be able to keep on producing the innovations to support its growth plans. They call that kind of thinking the not-invented-here syndrome that was endemic at IBM before Gerstner came on board. Now, companies like Cisco, Lucent and Nortel use the rest of the world to extend their R&D and product development capabilities.
A good ongoing case study to use is Bluetooth. Earlier in the year, the industry reached a consensus that in order to make Bluetooth ubiquitious, a single-chip implementation costing under $5 would be necessary and that is expected to take at least 2 years to reach volume production. A small startup in the UK, Cambridge Radio(?), however, is claiming that it can shorten that time by at least 50% with its own solution, which I believe is making the rounds around the $1 trillion global electronics community.
And I really don't understand why the Q and NOK have not entered into some sort of agreement.
Two words. Component shortages. If I have to explain to you the triage that is being applied as global supply lines rush to respond to the stupendous dynamics of the unit growth in wireless then you're on another bizarro planet altogether. For instance, who's going to get crunched during times of component shortages? The de facto global standard and its upgrade path like GSM/TDMA/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/4G or the niche standard like CDMAOne/1xRTT/3xRTT/CDMA2000?
Hint: Look at the huge disparity of the operating margins of Nokia, the #1 handset manufacturer, and Motorola, the #2 handset manufacturer, which has been beset by chronic component shortages for several quarters now.
BTW, interesting behavior from Motorola. On one hand, they buy chips from QCOM, but on the other hand, MOT and NOK both came up with 1extreme to put a cap on QCOM's hype about the poorly-accepted HDR vaporware (see comments by US West, Nortel, etc). |
