Mike,
Re: Intel & Qualcomm - Gorillas or Kings?
<< Regardless, if Ten is correct about that, it presumes that a Gorilla market can morph into a King market. Do we have any examples of that happening in the past? >>
The recent discussions about Intel (which I find very worthwhile although I am rather adamant about Intel's gorillahood), lead me to question whether Qualcomm is destined to morph into a king.
The issue is not having simply essential IP in a technology, it is IMO, having architectural control of the technology in either de facto or de jure manner.
The initial CDMA tornado is over. Hypergrowth has subsided rather dramatically. Qualcomm is now enjoying CDMA main street. We will not see >100% YOY subscriber growth of CDMA again for some time, and it is doubtful we will see it again for the architecture with high switching costs that Qualcomm has proprietary control over.
All indicators are that in the second half of this decade W-CDMA will become the dominant air interface for mobile wireless providers.
While Qualcomm has essential IP in W-CDMA, they have no architectural control over it. W-CDMA is a committee controlled architecture. Qualcomm does not participate in the committee (3GPP) that has been standardizing the architecture of the air interface and integrating it with the network subsystems(s) since early 1998.
Qualcomm fought vigorously for a single converged standard.
Dr. Jacobs commented openly on this in a letter to Business Week in September 1998 here:
Message 5849466
Instead a compromise was reached and rather than a single converged standard we have multiple harmonized standards.
In 1998 Qualcomm published a white paper called 5 Points:
Message 6207324
3GPP W-CDMA recognizes none of the first 3 principles of Qualcomm's 5 Points.
Qualcomm is in the process of harmonizing to 3GPP W-CDMA in 3GPP2 rather than the other way around, while concurrently evolving their own cdma2000 standard.
In addition, even within 3GPP2, Qualcomm is now more involved with the evolution of a committee based architecture, than they ever have been in the past as it relates to evolution of 1xEV-DV.
Moreover, so long as Qualcomm stays resident in 3GPP2, they run the risk of further losing the capability of influencing the architectural of W-CDMA, IMO.
For the moment, however, I still categorize both Intel & Qualcomm as gorillas.
One of these days I intend to go back and review Ferguson & Morris's "Computer Wars" Moore states "were the first to explicitly point out the importance of architectural control to market-place power" and which Moore freely admits to appropriating" when defining "Proprietary Open Architecture with High Switching Costs (page 52; RFM).
Interesting topic.
- Eric - |
