Mike, I was surprised that you thought the Q-phone low quality by comparison with the StarTac. The judge who considered the trade dress complaint by Motorola said they didn't have a strong enough position and that the Q-phone had a better look and feel or something along those lines. The StarTac was boxy or some such description. I KNOW that the cdma gizzards are better, but that wasn't your point.
When you say larger than you expected, the impression I had was that it was maybe slightly larger than the StarTac and the same size as a cigarette packet. Actually, one thing that could have been improved was for Qualcomm to make images actual size in its information rather than smaller than actual with the dimensions written below. The smaller image would cause people to be surprised when they see the real thing and would be offputting. People don't like unpleasant surprises.
The case must be plastic like everything else with wires and chips inside, so I guess the texture is no better than anything else. The design looks good to me.
It is premium priced because it is the best phone on the market. Yes, this pricing will only last until they have some real handset competition, then prices will drop. Of course, more advanced phones and features will come out just as happened in the computer industry, so the top product won't get cheaper. This is a race without end. Anyone who stops running is out of contention.
Bdog, Ramsey and others have expressed concern about Qualcomm's marketing skill. People have also said that some charisma is needed at the top. I'm not worried about either point.
The test of the advertising is the sales it generates. I haven't seen many ads at all, but I suspect they are okay. My wife said she didn't like the doll advertisement [the one like Barbie] but that doesn't mean it is a bad ad. What people say, what they think and what they do are three different things. Or four if you get confused like I do sometimes. We know how popular Barbie has been in the USA. So linking the Q-phone to Barbie can hardly be a mistake. Not everyone is a technowonk fascinated by abstruse cdmaphotons. Some want a cute little Barbiephone to talk to their pals and arrange lunch.
Maybe the paranoia ad will suit some hard driving businessmen or some such. I try to keep my own opinions out of such things because there are lots more people than me who buy things and they have all sorts of weird ideas that I don't experience. Like baseball. Can you imagine anyone wanting to take a perfectly good day and destroy it by watching baseball? But Qualcomm put money into Qualcomm Stadium. I try to check the numbers in such cases and judge the viewers' values not mine.
Other aspects of marketing all seem okay too. It was a shame that they got timing wrong on availability of commercial CDMA as that knocks customer confidence. But that was understandable. Their overall strategy of licensing, joint ventures, leveraging their technology into Globalstar, Eudora and other things all seems spot on to me.
On the charisma stuff. I far prefer brains to charisma for running my company. Nobody knows much more than a bit of the big picture these days, so you need somebody at the top to pick the charismatic public relations person, fund raiser or whatever function requires charisma. The top person primarily needs to be steady, have wide understanding in the field of business, brains, stuff like that, and know how to choose others. Qualcomm has been accused enough of hype. Imagine if there had been a charismatic huckster type at the top instead of a prosaic engineer.
On this thread, there is some cameraderie, but we like to know all points of view. I don't get money from Qualcomm or have any interest other than as a shareholder, so it serves no purpose for me to be other than bang on the mark as far as Qualcomm is concerned. Self-deception is the quickest road to ruin. If you try to trick others, you will almost certainly fool yourself too. Often posts are ignored, disputed or disparaged. Why, some of my most heartfelt, sacred posts have been vilified by friend and foe alike.
And of course, not all sheep are lambs, some are wolves in sheep's clothing. Some are mutton dressed as lamb. But we have dogs here to round them up. Qdogs and Bdogs.
Mqurice |
