Hi Propitious7,
Re: Thanks: I am profoundly pleased that you find my work useful. I also read your posts with great interest. I have read your 10-point New Year’s post on Qualcomm four or five times.
What can give me more return on my investment in learning than helping others learn too? Does a network effect not also compound knowledge? Like most professors, but unlike the exceptions to the rule in Irwin Jacobs or Richard Viterbi, I am a lousy entrepreneur. So I have not made any money from my effort, if a financial meaning is included in “other purposes.” Above all, I enjoy reading, learning, thinking, writing, and theorizing. I am excited by ideas.
Given that the burst stock bubble has dashed my hopes that I was a good investor, I decided I needed to look at my stocks and investing principles more closely than I had if I was to reduce the risk of my retirement lifestyle vanishing along with my rapidly diminishing portfolio. I could not compute the meaning of “bubble” until after the fact when I read the work of Chris Freeman or Carlotta Perez on the economic meanings in the historical patterns of successive industrial revolutions.
The mind is like a penis (or a vagina if that shoe fits), you use it or you lose it. I am a retired professor who is learning a new field as an avocation. Writing clarifies my mind. Qualcomm became a more in depth case study for facilitating and judging my own progress in understanding high technology and strategic architectural control. Currently, I am studying Arm Holdings as intensively, reading every white paper on their web site, trying to understand the technology and their strategy. I received 15 books for Christmas, which I am currently studying to broaden and deepen my knowledge base. I am a bibliophile, with all of the scholar’s disciplines and faults.
Simply put, because I am insightful, I believe you believe that I know more than I do. I take myself less seriously here.
Re: Some Cautions: Scope. You said, “The pressure of brevity on such complex subjects has also led you to an assertive and conclusory style which won’t necessarily persuade the skeptical or the uninformed.” I am excerpting sections, not necessarily in order, from an exceptionally long RTWSpecial Report on Qualcomm. It became so long that I feared that I had scared most reader’s away. (I wrote two earlier pieces for RTWReport on Strategic Architectural Control where I supplied a definition of the technical term “value web” in the April 2002 issue.)
I fear the pattern of an “assertive and conclusory” style lies deeper in my personality. If I may, let me illustrate this with a personal anecdote. When I retired, my colleagues and former students, all clinical psychology PhD’s, inscribed a consensus list of eleven adjectives descriptive of my personality on a plaque, creating an acronym from each initial capital letter for the master trait: CHARISMATIC. If they were being less kind, it might have read just as accurately: MESSIANIC.
I am attracted to the fringes and identify with the weak and become something of a champion on their behalf. (Qualcomm began from a relatively weak business position, where the intrinsic value of breakthrough ideas had to overcome an established hegemony in power and so on.) My style is “rhetorical” in the sense of striving to make sound arguments by marshalling the power of ideas. I do not believe the skeptical can be convinced; so I do not try. I would regret it if the “uninformed” were not better informed by what I write. I accept your caution as on target and well taken.
Slant. “The tone. . .is academic…but the substance is, quite often, a brief. . .or argument for one party.” You are right on both counts. I am by disposition and training an academic. You can take the professor out of the academy, but not the academic out of the professor.
However, most academics are more even handed. Some say “objectivity” is a characteristic of a scientist. I claim to be one, but do not accept objectivity as an ideal because I would distinguish “weighing the evidence” from “making your case.” Based on experience as an insider, I recognize that scientists are pretty passionate about making their cases. The reconstructed logic of science is an idealization that fails to reflect gritty reality of the logic-in-use. (It’s fang and claw in the Ivory Towers. The competitions in business are even more nitty gritty, sometimes even illegal!)
This may be a deep flaw in me as an analyst, but if so, I will live with it until I manage to change it. Most even-handedness is a pretense, easily seen through. After you have dared to muck around in people’s lives the way all psychotherapists must, I believe it becomes useful to understand that “objectivity” is a idealization, like “impartiality” is an ethical ideal ,that often cannot be realized in human matters because lives are messy and deeply personal, shot through with biased perceptions, ethical dilemmas, and hard choices. So-called evenhanded therapists are not truly objective, just ineffective. Their perceptions are not immaculate; their personalities are not healed or fully integrated. Everyone just does his or her damndest to see what is and do what is best. My writing, like my therapy, is simply my honest effort to see what is real and side with what is right as best I can.
So, I give this warning: Do not take what I say as representing AUTHORITY. Personally, I am deeply suspicious of authority and wildly in favor of personal AUTONOMY, particularly for me. (That is, my colleagues did not look deeply enough: my charisma is a Persona. My need for personal autonomy is my master trait; just ask my wife, who is also a psychologist. Like my Shadow, she knows.) I make my own mistakes and take responsibility for them; I trust all of my readers to do the same. (I have spent my whole life trying to learn from my errors and found the process deeply fascinating. Thus, I highly recommend it.) My disclaimer was: “I am merely a scholarly student, neither a technologist, nor a financial analyst.” (You pay your money and take your chances. In this instance, my writing is free and correctly valued at zero by current market prices.)
Lingering Questions: I am not an industry insider; I simply read a couple of books and thought about things. So, with that proviso, I will share my speculations as incomplete and inadequate responses to your three searching questions. I know nothing profound; I just trust myself as a clinician and this proposition: Reading strategic choices from company actions is like interpreting motives from client’s behavior.
What follows is sheer speculation, and it calls for conclusions! Not only that, it requires that I start introducing conclusions before I have even begun discussing 3G technology and strategies, much less finished my exposition. I have a lot more material to post. Unfortunately, I am very academic, both long-winded and opinionated.
(Dear readers, I will try to avoid being drawn into thread discussions in the future. So, please don’t take my lack of public response personally. I will always privately post short “thank you’s” or “acknowledgements” that I am reading and noting your commentary. I am not conducting tutorials; that would cost money. (gg) Please stay in your role as dear readers, or post among yourselves. I am a happy recluse just reading my books. (gg))
1. WCDMA Development: Nokia and the Europeans needed to forge an alliance with Japan to repeat their GSM Grand Alliance strategy. Nokia had modeled itself after the Asian Tigers. NTT DoCoMo, seeking a first-mover competitive advantage (a surprise attack), launched the FOMA network before UMTS standards were formalized. Not having foreseen the complexity of spread spectrum implementation, the network is not successfully commercialized, neither a technological success, nor a profit maker. So far, not enough money is involved to be worth a lawsuit. And, DoCoMo promises to bring its technology in line with UMTS standards.
Non-stability in the standards and potential claims of IPR delay the rollout of UMTS in Europe and Asia, which is to Qualcomm’s strategic advantage. So far as I know, only Qualcomm has systematically secured cross-licensing from the major GSM/UMTS companies. The cross-licenses are limited specifically to multimode phones to allay fears that they might invade the GSM handset market. Perhaps their rivals did not foresee Q’s mastery of multimode technology at the level of tight integration in a single chipset, in contrast to placing multiple modems within a handset, which threaten the GSM and UMTS markets more indirectly.
WCDMA mindshare still dominates world markets. Remember how Qualcomm had to threaten introducing its own network a couple of years ago to hold KDDI in its CDMA2000 camp. Contrast that with KDDI current success.
But, the MII decisions in China will be very influential in whether CDMA2000 will tip the market completely to becoming the de facto standard or whether the harmonization strategy that includes UMTS under the spread spectrum umbrella as a viable choice, will mean Qualcomm will become a winner-take-most hub. I believe Qualcomm will compete effectively in the UMTS markets. If China selects wCDMA as one standard, rather than all CDMA2000, then winner-take-most, rather than CDMA2000-takes-all are my predicted outcomes. (If you could just wait a few days, Impatient Readers, I have a perfectly nice Einstein-Bose condensate argument that I have cooked up from a recipe by Barabasi as the conceptual structure for such an argument. gg)
2. GSM Licensing and Royalties. I do not know what royalties Asian GSM manufacturers are paying. I suspect a company like, say, Samsung, is trading IPR claims for reduced royalties or, say, the Korean MIC is trading royalty reduction for promissory notes to let UMTS compete with CDMA2000 in their markets. This hedges Korea’s huge bet on CDMA2000. The Koreans, however, will use Qualcomm’s UMTS chipsets and their GSM1x sets to gain competitive advantage in GSM markets, as their primary strategy. The multimode strategy is potentially a big winner.
I believe the Chinese will postpone their decisions to produce maximum power from their negotiating position as King-maker, searching primarily for technology transfer of knowledge and build-up of forces within Chinese or Asian markets. Qualcomm shares and educates; Europe does not. Ultimately, they will rely, like the U.S., on capitalistic competition to winnow the 3G wheat. They are patient and can wait until a winner becomes apparent, if they continue to let China Telecom and its southern branch build out CDMA WLL. Long-term, which is how the Chinese think, they are positioning for 4G and after.
3.Tell us more about Qualcomm’s 3G Evolution. Just keep on readin’, and I’ll keep on truckin’!
I hope this helps,
Don |
