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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (4255)	4/18/2000 1:37:00 PM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 34857

I have a lot of respect for your Kamikaze courage, Maurice. There was a newsclip on BBC World about a two-ton baby seal wreaking havoc in a small town in New Zealand last week. Apparently it has this gung-ho habit of climbing out of the ocean and totaling parked vehicles by humping them affectionately. Maybe it's something in the water over there. For some reason I thought about your investment strategy (which was nothing short of stellar in 1999). Gung-ho car-humping worked like a charm as a telecom investment approach last year. I'm not so sure about year 2000, though. It seems that Qualcomm really didn't want this news to come out right now. And it seems that the leak was timed with demonic cunnning. When Qualcomm was forced to announce the cdma2000 plan prematurely, it was backed into a corner. Quote: "He did not specify which companies have been approached to join a possible Qualcomm-led consortium. Matsumoto said that the company will make a final decision as to whether or not to apply by early May." Which makes the whole plan look like an improvisation. This would be bad - because multi-billion dollar investment projects aren't supposed to be whipped up three weeks before the license application deadline. Which gets us back to the topic of what appeals to Wall Street right now. Not kamikaze courage - but consistency. Nokia is executing the W-CDMA strategy it conceived in mid-Nineties. Qualcomm is apparently thinking on its feet; improvising a whole new project for a new 3G network for Japan. I think investors crave security right now. They yearn for a highly visible earnings outlook. They pine for safe, solid, firmly managed growth vehicles. Right now - I don't think that investors have much stomach for grand, courageous adventures with dim profit outlook. You distilled something very important into this sentence: "I'm amazed at the wimpy approach people take such as 'we mustn't compete with our customers'. If the customers aren't doing it, get stuck in! That's their problem." Sounds like the perfect description of Qualcomm's attitude towards its customers. We probably draw different conclusions from this. Tero