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

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (5364)	6/9/2000 12:03:00 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Tero, Any comments on the latest PR "salvo" from Qualcomm--that those tardy to 3G licenses (even for W-CDMA) better pay now or be ready to pay more later? I kind of wonder why all this needs to be done by press release.

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (5364)	6/10/2000 1:25:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

<There is a kind of "Deathrace 2000" between how much money Q rakes in from licensing fees and chipset business; and how much of this money the R&D department manages to destroy. That's what makes this company so compelling - no other major telecom firm has people whose specific duty it seems to be to flush 100-dollar bills down the toilet.> You have put your finger on an attribute of the Q! leadership Tero. Not for them the boring Coca Cola cash flow forecasts of a new but fairly certain project. What Q! people have done and we can be sure that personality traits don't change much with time, is take income from a solidly established business and use that to develop risky, but high value new technologies with fairly early moves to profit. If some crash, then that's part of the price of high risk, "breaches the laws of physics" type development projects. But the key to success is having the brains to actually succeed. Compare the technology in Iridium and Globalstar for example. Nokia is much more of a 'known quantity', down to earth business which has been wildly successful. There is plenty of room for companies like that. They are the bread and butter of human life. Imaginative, daring companies work outside the limits of normal human experience and it is in that zone that the disaster or wild success are more likely. Those who know what they are doing succeed. It's scary for investors who might not have a clue what's going on, but not really dangerous [if the leaders are right]. Does the Nokia boss read The Elegant Universe for light relief after breaching the laws of physics while building a S&P500 business and leading the world into WWeb? That's what Irwin Jacobs does. Entertainment for people like that is not just to make money. It's to soar on the wings of imagination. It can look like a race to burn all the money before the shareholders get it, but check out the 15 year history of Q! and the decades of Jacobs/Viterbi and co before that. Nokia would do well to join them - Q! always seek lots of supporters. Nokia has got brilliant ability to convert the products of that imagination into tools useful for the common herd. They need only offer their services. Maurice