Dave, things were pretty good to 30 September for Q! you know. The old revenue graph continued the exponential rise. Earnings too. Handset sales too. ASIC sales too. Royalties too. Eudora hit a flat patch and needs to be a carrier of the Q! brand, farmed out as open code or whatever it's called and part of the Q! advertising campaign. Infrastructure is going pretty well. WirelessKnowledge/Wireless Business Solutions is under way, with the old Omnitracs doing just fine.
At the end of 1997, not many people were predicting 20 million cdmaOne handsets in use at the end of 1998. Don't forget that with production lines flat out, the salesmen won't be offering any discounts! That means better handset margins. This is a GOOD problem to have.
ASICs will be flooding out to the 26 or so licensees. And these are the new improved MSM3000.
Tero thinks that Nokia will be bringing out the 61xx cdmaOne handset 1Q or 2Q 1999, though he previously claimed they will deliberately make scungy cdmaOne handsets to maintain GSM as the premium platform. Well, he'll have to back down fast when he sees Nokia going as fast as they can to hit the top of the cdmaOne market with the best handsets they can bring to bear. He has already backed down from that idea with his suggestion that 61xx is on the way.
He also had been persevering with his old dead GSM horse, flogging it and flogging it making the carcass unacceptable even for the taxidermist. He had been saying that GSM was the road to the future up until a week or few ago, even while cdma2000 was wending its way to victory. I suppose we won't hear that refrain again, now that Nokia is serious on cdmaOne if the rumours are true. These Nokians will of course be based on MSM3000 with yummy royalties to Q! Go Nokia!
The landscape IS going to shift dramatically over the next couple of years. Just as it did in the past two.
Analogue and analog will cease to exist. cdmaOne will have staggering growth. TDMA will top out quickly as the price wars get serious in handsets and minutes and coverage becomes vital. GSM will lumber on for a while longer, but will have a collapse similar to analogue in a year or three.
Tero will also climb down from his demand that handset makers have more than 10% market share to even stay in business as the niche, fractal, chaotic world of individuality is recognized and mass produced boring, lowest common denominator handsets are left on the shelves.
The Q-Phone and pdQ will have to move very fast as use-by dates arrive in months, not years. These things are inherently cheap to make and functionality development will be vital. I really can't get excited by the limited Web access that the pdQ is going to provide. I doubt it will be a world stunning hit. It will be a good debut, but in months will look like the Model T of the car world, meaning in being anachronistic rather than a big seller.
If we think of auto industry years, we need to think of cellular industry months.
Mqurice |
