It certainly seems that Nokia has everything to gain and nothing to lose by taking a stubborn attitude and proceed to ship WCDMA product without a Qualcomm licence beyond April 2007. Of course, by the same logic, Qualcomm can continue to ship multimode WCDMA chipsets without a Nokia cross license as well, but, since the current arrangement provides for the unilateral flow of royalty monies from Nokia to Qualcomm, Nokia would seemingly come out ahead at least until such a time when Qualcomm is able to prevail legally and extract the royalty monies at a later time. Therein lies the rub. As demonstrated by the IDCC case, when will this be, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years from now (if at all). Would this then provoke the entire WCDMA hardware manufacturing community to rebel and effectively cause Qualcomm's value chain (admittedly developed with enormous skill and effort) to crash like a house of cards. Is this also the main reason for Nokia to exit CDMA, to effectively reduce this to a plain and simple WCDMA conflict betwen two IPR "equals". All of the threatened and confirmed CDMA to GSM flipping all over the third world, whether or not fueled by cleverly authored press releases and personal counseling sessions with key business and governmental personnel peppered with strategic misinformation, kickbacks in cash or kind (including the discrete provision of expensive prostitutes, something that is so prevalent that it is routinely expected in the third world prior to any contracts being signed) is just gravy. As someone mentioned before, the gloves are off, but when it comes to fighting down and dirty, Nokia seems to have a clear advantage.
Another question would be about splitting the company. Would Nokia choose to counter by adopting the Spinco strategy and split its own company to form a separate IPR division (since a lot of very vital IPR is now being claimed) to deal with Qualcomm on an equal footing. |
