I think Eric's protests about QCOM are worthy of mention. Just like Tero, he claims the superiority of Nokia without any fact or reason. I have never seen him back up a single post with any intelligent fact or documentation to support his negative analysis of QCOM.
I'm sorry, but I have to laugh. Take a look at my profile and see what one of my favorite stocks is. As I said once in a post directed to you, of all people, Qualcomm's 9% of my port (perhaps 10% after the spike today), and my Nokia position, which I don't plan on holding for more than a few more months for growth reasons, is only a fraction of that. If you check out some of my Motley Fool posts, you'll see that I've defended Qualcomm numerous times over there, even getting "Post of the Day" for two of my pieces. Even if you go to the second post-script within a post I wrote yesterday on this board(http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=14714974), you'll see some positive comments I made about the company.
Over here, I never bashed Qualcomm. I defended W-CDMA, which, although you don't realize it as of yet, should be a nice boost to Qualcomm's bottom line by 2002, and an absolute godsend for the company by 2003, when rollouts really pick up. As far as facts go, to defend my arguments, I brought up mentions of trials, R&D efforts, rollout schedules, chipset development, standardization work, and the long amount of time for which all of this has been taking place.
In response, I did get a couple of articulated replies from engineer regarding problems that can come up with new technologies when they first roll out. However, I never denied that DoCoMo might have some initial delays, and I didn't receive anything that states specific technological weaknesses related to W-CDMA which will delay expected rollout dates by a significant amount of time (i.e. one year or more). Yes, I read the Gilder report, and I know about how W-CDMA hogs processing power and battery life when compared to cdma2000, but that's not the same as saying that the technology won't work. I also refuted the argument that it takes 18 months from the time that a chipset starts sampling to get to the point where it's sold in a commercial handset, as evidenced by the rate at which the MSM5000 went from the sampling stage to commercial use.
I'll freely admit that, although I know the basics regarding how CDMA systems and wireless systems in general work, I'm definitely not as technically knowledgable as some of the others here. So, I'm asking, if anyone can tell me exactly why, on a technical level, W-CDMA is nothing but smoke and mirrors, or, at the very least, will be delayed significantly in spite of the billions of dollars and thousands of engineers that have been used for pushing its commercial development, please step up and present your case. I'm not talking about conjecture regarding issues that might come with a new technology, or problems that once came up with TDMA after only three years of development, or things that might push back deployments by a month or two (I really wouldn't be surprised if DoCoMo sees some minor delays), but actual technical facts regarding why the technology won't work as promised.
If you present such an argument, you have my word that I'll listen to you with an open mind. Who knows, if your argument's strong enough to show that W-CDMA won't come anywhere as soon as promised, I might even be convinced to sell my shares of Qualcomm. However, as of yet, I still haven't seen anything to make me consider doing this.
Eric |
