Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: qdog who wrote (2294)	10/15/2000 4:15:03 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12245

Qpooch, the NZ government anti-monoply commerce commission has just stopped a $$multibillion takeover of Fletcher Energy fcl.co.nz by Shell. The share price has tumbled and a lot of shareholders are angry. Rightly so. The concern the stupid Commerce Commission had was that Shell would own too much of the supply of gas [methane]. I happen to be a domestic gas user. But I'm not in the slightest worried about Shell taking over from Fletcher Energy. I'm in favour of it if the shareholders want to do that. If I thought it would make them huge profits, I would have bought Fletcher Energy shares some time ago [I was aware of this deal while the share price was cheap]. One way they can increase profits is by cutting the number of people involved in producing gas by combining boards of directors, and other duplicated staff. But the worry of the Commerce Commission is that they would increase prices. Maybe they will. But if they do that, I'll cut down how much gas I use and increase the electricity. Bigger customers will switch to fuel oil, electricity or take some other action to rebalance their production. Yes, Shell might have a near monopoly on gas. But there are lots of ways of getting energy, including insulation or moving to a place where cheaper energy is available. The same thing applies to MSFT's 'monopoly'. People don't want an operating system. They want communication. So having a monopoly on one teeny little method of communication doesn't give them some great advantage. If they raise their OS price [which a true monopolist could do to the sky] they will find customers dropping away very quickly as a myriad of other communication methods are adopted. QCOM is much more a monopoly than MSFT ever was. Q! has TOTAL control of CDMA. Nobody, but nobody can use Q! technology without passing through the monopolistic toll gate. Q! is also leveraging that monopoly into other fields such as SnapTrack, Email, WirelessKnowledge [in cahoots with that other evil monopolist Microsoft]. Q! has a much better monopoly than MSFT because Q! has the force of law behind their monopoly - patent law, backed by no less than the most powerful legal and military system to ever roam the planet. Since Q! will feed that legal/military system by taxing the rest of the world via the CDMA monopoly, I doubt that the US government will even introduce price control on Q! But is IS a giant monopoly. Great! But watch out for jealous competitors trying to get anti-trust laws brought to bear. Mqurice