OK Mikey, you can be the official techno-dolt, and the rest of us, Tero excepted, can just be plain old dummies. While we're scenario writing, Tero, here's one dope's vision.
-Before the trial starts Ericsson and Q decide to settle. Ericy licenses its soft handoff IPR in return for Q granting them a royalty bearing license (ala Phillips settlement) to manufacture infrastructure and subsciber units under the W-CDMA standard, provided it is backward compatible with cdmaOne. Although Q gives ericy the same rate it will eventually agree to charge all licensees (lower than current royalty rates), the economics of the cross license works out to give ericy a slightly better deal than most others.
-Ericy triumphantly claims victory. And it is. They now have a slight cost advantage over all competitors except QCOM.
-QCOM announces it will agree to license all comers under the cdmaOne- compatible W-CDMA standard. Existing IS-95 licensees will be permitted to manufacture to the new standard under their existing agreements, but at the new, reduced royalty rate
-Wall Street will initially interpret this as a decrease in revenues for QCOM due to the lower royalty rate. Stock falls from mid-60's to high 50's. Only after a few more press releases and 500 SI posts will it become clear that Q will be taking a smaller cut of a market approximately three times larger, which will result in royalties nearly doubling. Stock gaps open up 10 and runs straight to the mid eighties that day. (Gee, Tero, as long as we're pretending we can predict short-term price movements, we might as well write scenarios that will juice the day-traders too!)
-Mikey is nominated professor emeritus at MIT, Maurice gets a countrywide slice of spectrum at 98 cents a POP, Ramsey declares a ten-year vacation moratorium, and the SF Giants win the world series.
NOTE: THE ABOVE SCENARIOS ARE FICTIONAL AND ANY RESEMBLANCE TO REALITY IS MERELY COINCIDENTAL (except the Giants part). DO NOT GET MY ASS IN A SLING BY MAKING INVESTMENTS ON THE BASIS OF SUCH SILLINESS.
-JLF
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