Trev, the success of MSFT and IBM over the "superior" Apple was not because of market "control" or serving those who "maintain the market". MSFT was copied for no charge by hordes of people and IBM's PC was cloned by swarms of competitors. Apple was the equivalent of TD-SCDMA = a proprietary little thing, not of interest to the mass market of Mr Average Human. QCOM's come one, come all, licensing system is like the MSFT/Intel situation. MSFT tried to stop piracy; luckily for them they couldn't, as young people without much money piled into MSFT/IBM clone rather than pay the expensive Apple prices, businesses didn't steal the software, so MSFT got money anyway and workers used paid MSFT at work and stolen MSFT at home, giving MSFT the lead over Apple [everyone had to pay].
GSM had the weight of numbers and succeeded in part because of hijacking of QCOM technology to upgrade to GPRS and EDGE. QCOM didn't play dog-in-the-manger, but licensed W-CDMA too to use their technology, on the same terms as CDMA2000 [not even charging them extra for goodness sakes!]
For a while, QCOM wasn't invited to play, so they couldn't do any tango. The point of W-CDMA was to extend GSM's life, and stymie QCOM. The point of TD-SCDMA is to garner a captive market and keep out foreigners. Neither W-CDMA nor TD-SCDMA have technological merit over CDMA2000 that I'm aware of. On the contrary, being initially in 2GHz, they had technology weakness = high cost of buildout compared with CDMA2000 in 800MHz and 450MHz [which is banned here and there]. CDMA2000 is technologically ahead of W-CDMA [despite the pontificating about the "great" W-CDMA by the GSM Guild].
I don't think QCOM chose not to play. They were excluded, outvoted etc. But they did focus on what they were doing - people can't do everything.
No, <solely focusing on the provision of superior market dominating technologies has it's pitfalls. isn't that the downfall of all engineering types > I spent my working time in the interface between engineering and customers. Non-engineers tend to make big blunders - see, for example, what they did to Formula Shell, see how 'Eurograde' was supposed to be a "great" thing. I suppose those are arcane references, but my point is engineers can understand marketing, a lot easier than marketers can understand engineering.
Engineers are smarter than accountants/marketers, and any turkey can do a marketing arm-waving degree in bullshit and bluster. Check out some "service provider" p-----g plans for example, and mumbo jumbo marketing gimmicks, which annoy most customers though there are some who go for them.
Note that $ill Gates, Larry Ellison, Irwin Jacobs, and hordes of others are engineers rather than accountants, lawyers, or marketing/business graduates. It's the engineers who have built everything. The rest hang on like remora sucker fish, or bottom feed like hagfish.
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