And he shoots and he.....misses! LOL. Man, is this guy predictable or what? This unilateral declaration of imaginary victories capped with melodramatic exits must be catching on in some murky sub-culture somewhere.
Well, let's try to turn this unfortunate situation to some use.
His reference to the 'seamless handoff fiasco' is instructive because it reflects his narrowminded view of innovation that, in turn, explains his irrational attachment to QCOM, hatred towards IDCC and all his heavy losses on his sure-thing bet on QCOM.
Does QCOM's soft handoff patent represent the terminating point in the development of all handoff systems? Of course not.
ATT was issued the groundbreaking Mobile Communication System patent in 1972 that made the HANDOFF between cells in an analog cellular system possible. Many companies, including QCOM, built on that concept and developed their own novel implementations of analog and digital wireless systems that utilized hard handoffs and soft handoffs. Patents being built on the foundation of earlier patents. That's the historical dimension of innovation, which never occurs in a societal vacuum.
While QCOM may have been the first to adapt the handoff concept for its proprietary narrowband CDMAOne system, does that necessarily mean that QCOM has a monopoly over that implementation now and forever? Of course not.
As the history of IDCC's seamless handoff patent showed, Motorola, ATT, Hughes and Ericsson all have patents constantly improving the state of the art in CDMA handoff technology.
What is important at this point in the evolution of the global wireline/wireless system is whose novel seamless handoff implementation gets embedded as essential in the ITU2000 standards. And as the 3GPP working documents clearly show, a very rigorous process is at work at the standards level, involving a very high degree of mathematical abstraction constantly being refined by practical trial and error.
For the most part, theory matched by field data produces the best practical innovations that are easily commercialized. In this case, the focus is clearly on making TDMA/GSM systems evolve to the most advanced forms of WCDMA. Hybrid TDMA/CDMA systems, in other words.
There are older TDMA/GSM networks and there are newer TDMA/GSM networks. All those require logistical expertise in order to organize the global supply lines to produce the right products for the right networks for the right price.
That's the value of real-world trials at a time when the pace of technical innovation is accelerating, not decelerating or at a standstill. |
