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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gdichaz who wrote (7402)	10/3/1999 5:06:00 PM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 54805

Cha2, << Chapter 9 case study of Cisco ... 4 tornadoes for Cisco >> Same in Chapter 10 (CRM Software) ... summary on page 279 ... 3 tornadoes in 3 separate back office categories with an additional looming. << relevant is that Qualcomm may well also be participating in more than one tornado right now >> Agreed. Your wireless/internet. Wireless data in general. and I think VOIP looming. Voice is boring and not far from main street, IMO, in many countries if not the world as a whole. Also interested in hearing others thoughts. - Eric -

To: gdichaz who wrote (7402)	10/3/1999 7:10:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Cha2, At your suggestion I read the Cisco history for about the tenth time. When you mentioned the four tornados and what we can learn from them, I looked at that section with new perspective. The first tornado, the router tornado, produced a gorilla (Cisco.) The next tornado in intelligent hubs became a royalty game but produced no kings. The third tornado in LAN swithces became a royalty game that produced a king, again Cisco. It's probable that Cisco became the king primarily because of its gorilla powers in the strongly related router market. My point is that that the tornado by itself might not have produced a king were it not for the fact that Cisco was already a gorilla in a related market. The fourth tornado of remote access devices also produced no gorillas or kings. In summary, of the four tornados only one of them produced a gorilla. Only one of them produced a king, and that might not have happened were it not for the established gorilla position in a related market. Only one of the tornados became a gorilla game, partly because some of the other three were continuous innovations, not discontinuous innovations, and partly because the tornados were all about technologies that were not proprietary at the core. What lessons of the networking history can we apply to the current wireless biz? Qualcomm may well also be participating in more than one tornado right now. CDMA is the obvious one. But the wireless/internet nexus is another perhaps. And data is likely to be a much stronger tornado than voice in wireless IMO. I'll try to explain how I look at that stuff by using an analogy. If the internal combustion engine was a game (albeit a royalty game) it was important because it became possible for individual passengers to have mobile flexibility (by putting it inside cars), because it became possible to move vast weights of cargo (by putting it inside trucks and locomotives), and because it powered huge machines needed in farming and manufacturing. For me, CDMA is a combustion engine of sorts (actually, it's more like the highway) of the internet, data transmission and voice transmission. CDMA will help the wireless/Internet nexus come to being sooner than later. CDMA will help move data and voice sooner than later too. We now know how the tornados of LAN switches, remote access devices and intelligent hubs helped sustain the router business of which Cisco was the gorilla. It would give us greater confidence in the long-term potential of our Qorilla if we can identify the tornados that might similarly help the advancement of CDMA. An example of that is certainly the proprietary technology of digital movies that Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are competing in. Should Texas Instruments or any other competitor win that battle, the massive amounts of data in the movie files will no doubt travel through the cosmos using Qualcomm's CDMA innovations. This is exactly comparable to Cisco's relatively unsuccessful bid in the intelligent hubs market; they lost out to a couple of strong princes in that market but those two princes sure helped the market in which Cisco was (is) a gorilla. Am I on the track you hinted at? --Mike Buckley