Marvin:
Since I know nothing of your background, the following is written with all due respect.
The oft-proclaimed “management has no credibility comment” is one of my great professional pet-peeves. I can only infer from your comment about Qualcomm’s “openness” that you joined the QC party pretty late in the game, and certainly post Harvey White. When CDMA’s commercial deployment slipped by a year, the know-nothings howled that Irwin had lied. When Airtouch asked for a thirteen kilobit vocoder rather than the eight kilobit schema originally contemplated by IS-95, the know-nothings called Irwin a “snake-oil salesman” who had over-promised vis-a-vis CDMA’s capacity relative to GSM. Know-nothings have a profound tendency to attribute any adverse change in a business plan to flawed, incompetent management, particularly if the price of their investment happens to decline in tandem the development. I am much more interested in management’s response to adversity than the setback in-and-of-itself.
I prefaced my last post by noting that we deliberately avoided investing in Globalstar while it was pre-commercial. Do you think this was a random decision? You seem not to grasp the complexity of designing, deploying, integrating and commercializing a global satellite constellation dependent on the efforts of a myriad of vendors, not to mention the vicissitudes of a multiplicity of international governmental constituencies and the efforts of monolithic, bureaucratic marketing partners. To be frank, I am surprised and impressed that Globalstar went commercial as close to schedule as it did. But, you know what, the commercialization schedule isn’t your beef; you’d be a happy camper if the company had 250,000 subscribers right now wouldn’t you? And your beef with Bernard is that he promised you, personally I suppose, that this would happen and it didn’t. So, now Bernard is a lying sack of poo-poo right? His prior record of accomplishment is nullified in a fit of pique because subscriber growth has been slow than some prior expectation? Obviously it's time to start burning the man in effigy.
I guess you didn’t bother to read the middle paragraphs of my first post. By its architectural design, Globalstar’s management has limited influence over the marketing process. Part of the genius in Globalstar’s design was the decision to partner with service providers on a geography specific basis. This local orientation allows the service to be customer tailored to demands of specific vertical markets based on real-time information as opposed to some central planning authority’s view of the world. The soft underbelly to this structure is that the network operator inherently cedes control to the local service provider and is dependent on its partner’s success. Moreover, local service providers are large telephone companies that tend to move at a somewhat geologic pace, hence my elephant metaphor. Also, to be trite, dislocations happen. Vodaphone buys Airtouch. Vodaphone/Airtouch then decides to merge its U.S. cellular assets with BellAtlantic to form Verizon. That’s a pretty damn big dislocation. Does it mean that Airtouch has walked away from its commitment to Globalstar? No. Does it mean that Airtouch is more focused on effecting the merger than marketing a new service? Probably. Are there specific artifacts, such as the preoccupation of Airtouch’s computer systems personnel with deployment of a common billing system that has impaired the Globalstar U.S.A.'s marketing strategy and efficiency? Absolutely. Tell me...my dear expert on management credibility...how much of this is controllable by Bernard Schwartz? As I commented before, elephants move at their own pace.
Despite the setbacks, challenges and slippage on the margin, my high opinion of Bernard Schwartz has not changed. So what. My opinion is less valuable than say Irwin Jacobs’ thinking on the man. I’ll make it simple for you, one can infer a lot from Qualcomm’s continued financial support of Globalstar. But, maybe then you will opine that Irwin has lost credibility in tandem with Bernard? |
