*Happy with Q!* Absolutely happy Jim. I bought reality, not a hyped up share price. One could be happy to own Yahoo! too but there is likely to come a fall. One could be happy to have owned the tulips, gold in 1980 and any number of speculative prospects. True, Nokia is based on some real results, so it is not quite a wild speculation.
I paid $18 for Q! [most of my stock] and was looking for real technological developments and huge market development with IS-95 and Qualcomm's technology to take over mobile communications. The stock price is incidental. If the stock price stays at $70 for 10 years, I'm happy to bank a lot of dividends - say $20 per year in a few years. I don't care if nobody else wants to bid the stock price up.
After 20 years, I'll throw the stock certificate in the rubbish and be very happy.
Actually, a stock price appreciation from $18 to $68 since 1994 is not all bad either. Even in the absence of dividends [Leap doesn't count for much!].
How exciting to see Q! owning the gates to the WWeb. Also to see cdmaOne successful and booming. Eudora doing fine, at least in market share and carrying the Qualcomm brand. ASICs selling up a storm. Handsets going like crazy and making heaps. New technology rolling out weekly. It's hard to feel disappointed in that environment.
The few disappointments have been:
Paying Interdigital a few million to shut them up.
2 years delay in getting cdmaOne commercially ready and accepted.
NextWave Telecom failure and $20m down the gurgler.
Infrastructure problems and $20m down the gurgler.
Delays in getting Q-Phones up to speed.
Zenit crashing our dreams into Siberia.
QCP820 connector failure.
Belt clip failure.
Plastic cracking.
Eudora not being leveraged into an Internet Stock.
There have been other disappointments such as China messing around, Korea trying to redo a contract, Europe trying to hijack 3G etc but those are in the nature of external events which can't really be called Q! problems.
All these problems can be put in the 'teething troubles' category. None are systemic and none are fatal. Some have huge opportunity cost such as Eudora being just an email product instead of being an encrypted $$Email carrier with Q! as banker, a portal or some such.
I'm much happier owning Q! than Nokia.
Yes, things might change, but let's hope not too much since things have gone so well. It's hard to imagine things getting even better while still using humans...
Mqurice
PS: Tero is good. Won't answer questions or objections, but that's okay. He still puts up some good information and makes some good comment. Thanks Tero! Official good joker and 'columnist'!! Certainly interesting reading; biased, but so are we all. Waiting for some spam but not expecting any... |
