Hey Apollo,
If I remember correctly OVTI split not more than 6 months ago. Not always a great harbinger of things to come.
But I lean more towards you Apollo on the extent of QCOM's dominance, however, Mike has a good point as much of this dominance will not likely come from architectural control.
Still, I think, like Intel, QCOM will be able to build from its core position to dominate more of the product down the road. Just thinking of new wireless applications, one suggested by the conference from Nextel that you linked to with live conversation and video from the pits during a NASCAR race. Talk about new, new, new media. This is not easy to implement stuff, and requires far more than just the ability to produce basic chips that can do CDMA, it requires some real knowledge and focus. I have yet to see a single company other than QCOM with the focus, speed, and skill to be able to produce chips that can so function. As long as 3G and its applications remain in a tornadic fashion, I think QCOM is going to find itself in an extremely enviable competitive position. Only after the tornado dies away might some weaknesses from the W-CDMA world likely to rear their head.
Other functions such as point to multi-point transmissions, and who knows what else are going to create applications and functions so revolutionary as what we are looking at is not just some cool new cellular phones but an entirely new, new, media, just as the Internet became the new media, with portable wireless devices, powered by 3G, which is dominating and I think will continue to dominate just because of the pace of innovation, and QCOM's focus and dominance.
Were it just incremental applications we were likely to see I'd be less optimistic and more concerned about certain Royalty aspects of the 3G marketplace, but because we are looking at new, new, media being created at a rapid pace, it leaves little time for competitors to actually learn how to produce these very difficult chips, much less keep up with the pace of innovation.
Tinker |
