I can't prevent malicious people from posting my text... but could I at least ask for a link to be added after the illegal copy? Would that be a reasonable request? In the spirit of Christmas, Kwanzaa and Chanukkah? Or whatever dark and malevolent god you twisted copyright infringers worship in the dead of night?
We are negotiating with advertisers and I *have* to keep up the hit growth of my columns. Yes, Tim, I want to be friends. And friends don't let friends buy QCOM - at least not without pointing out that the risks are considerable. This is not your father's retirement stock.
Gregg, I genuinely appreciate our correspondance - even if you use it in public to bludgeon my credibility. It's a price I'm willing to pay. But I do not buy the licensing argument. I do not believe that any company can afford a semi-succesful handset division - the drain on resources is too big. The management track record of Qcom phone division is devastating - atrocious pricing, wrong strategic decisions (like producing the original Q-phone for a single digital band), bad plastic, software snags, questionable design, slow product roll-outs, delayed model introductions, market share losses, weak brand.
Yes, I said market share losses. When someone else than Qualcomm is able to show that Dataquest's numbers are supposed to miss the mark by 100% I'm willing to reconsider - now there is little reason to think that Dataquest could be so colossally incompetent. Has everybody forgotten the debacle of early -98, when Qualcomm management said publicly that everything is A-OK... only to issue a profit warning a couple of days later? They are *not* more credible than Dataquest. And if this company undercounted Qualcomm sales, who says they didn't undercount the sales of other companies as well? These mistakes are usually systematic.
Why the handset fixation - read about that later on in a column called
"Why the handset fixation?" at:
debry.com
Happy Holidays to everyone but Michael,
Tero |
