Your Teroist methods of discussion have reduced Gregg to shouting at you and giving up in the face of what Americans call stonewalling, or being "in denial". I suspect the frustration stems from different perspectives. You are like a happy lamb, playing in the springtime, prancing and gamboling, enjoying the Nokia moment and not really wanting to hear the deep rumble of the abattoirs truck taking the sheep away. Gregg is trying to pin down logical outcomes to the current situation. Trying to get a happy lamb on a sunny day to sit still and have a logical, factual, discussion is simply not going to work.
You did ask a question:
"It has been pointed out again and again that W-CDMA has been under development for 7-9 years. Yet this legend that W-CDMA is somehow a response to IS-95 lives on. Look, I know Nokia people who were working on W-CDMA back in 1993. Short of buying them tickets to San Diego and making them swear on a bible that the W-CDMA program existed in early Nineties, just what does it take to convince Qcom enthusiasts?"
Dear Tero, QUALCOMM was formed in 1986. The founders had been creating TDMA in Linkabit. They formed Q! with the idea of bringing CDMA to mobile. In 1991 Q! had their initial public offering. In the late 1980s, they had already formed alliances and were signing licences. To their credit, Nokia was aware enough to sign a licence in the early 1990s. A bit late, but due to the unexpectedly lengthy development process, not too late as it happened.
Interdigital was also working on CDMA with more focus on wireless local loop because mobile isn't that easy. Their CDMA was broader band than QUALCOMM's. When you say that Nokia was working on WCDMA in 1993, it is pretty clear that they were at least 7 years later than the QUALCOMM founders who were probably thinking about it even earlier than actually forming Q! Now perhaps you can find some who were working on it sooner than 1993, but in any event, it seems likely that they were responding to IS-95 and looking for a way to take it beyond voice only. Data was then likely to be important, and that would have been the focus of their efforts.
The Web arrived later than that. Well, the network existed, but the concept of the Web as totally dominant only arrived over the past year or three. $ill Gates only woke to it in 1995. Many are still struggling with it, not understanding that the Web is going to make the industrial revolution look trivial.
The idea of ubiquitous multimedia WWeb CDMA based handy little devices only arrived in the past couple of years. And is still questioned by many, even including some CDMA fanatics on this very thread [Qdog anyway]. Q! was lining IP [internet protocol] up in 1990 to form part of the Q! world. It is now becoming timely.
So you can see that Nokia and Ericsson can hardly be said to be in the vanguard of WWeb[TM]. Despite you knowing Nokia people who were working on VW40 back in 1993.
So, to answer your question, it would take a little more than some specious claim to knowing a couple of Nokians who in 1993 claim to have been working on VW40 to convince me that VW40 is not a response to the development of cdmaOne.
When companies work on something, they don't start out full blown. They have somebody who has an idea, who persuades their boss who allows a tentative dabble which then expands as confidence and necessity build. Q! in 1986 had a handful of people working on cdmaOne. Now there are many thousands. Same with Nokia and Ericy. While denying cdmaOne could work, they were not fully gung ho on it in their R&D departments. Nokia wouldn't have brought out a failure of a cdmaOne handset in 1998 if they had been fully gung ho.
Claiming a great victory over cdmaOne because of the huge growth of GSM is a bit like Saddam claiming a marvellous victory after taking over Kuwait. Even I bought 3 GSM handsets [Alcatel] recently. So did thousands upon thousands of others buy GSM. So I have been boosting the great and wondrous success of GSM. Yes, I love the standby time. You are right, I bought a low end model because as you identified in your spotting the trend, I don't plan on keeping it long. But the price per minute is absurdly high. You don't mention that very much in your enthusiasm for GSM handsets and what is important to customers.
Yes, my QCP820 battery life is hopeless in analogue mode and I don't use it.
But as soon as cdmaOne is available, guess what is going to happen to the analogue phones. Yep, they'll be tossed into the abattoir's truck, along with any Teroists still gamboling in the GSM fields.
There you are, your question answered.
Mqurice
PS: Thread members, don't bother with giving Teroists lists of questions, or even single questions. Don't bother with other than rhetorical questions. I tried once to get Tero to answer a single simple question and persevered with it until it was clear than he has some gap in his corpus collosum which prevents questions being handed over from his receptive centres to his processing centres in the other half of his brain.
neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu |
