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

To: voop who wrote (38831)	2/1/2001 11:47:33 PM
From: voop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Now here is a post from Fool that tries to tie some of my favorite companies together boards.fool.com This is about architecture and I think that an architecture war may be erupting. QCOM could get it wrong and delay the 3G/CDMA end user tornado. The reason I am interested in this issue is that I want to start getting a clear picture of the 3G stack and the various players swinging in the vines to mark out territory. This is a multiple gorilla market. QCOM is clearly already a gorilla in the 3G stack. I would put them in the 'network chip' category. Parellel to that is the 'compute chip' category. Absent a tornado, it does seem like ARMHY is the gorilla here. Above that would be the 'network hardware' category. This would include handset, PDA, pager and other gadgets and appliances. IMO, this level will produce many royalty games as the industry innovates towards the 'killer app'. Above that is the operating system. This is where things get interesting. Is there a '3G CDMA' operating system or is there a 'wireless internet appliance' operating system. With the announcement of BREW it looks like QCOM wants the former. In the latter scenario, Wind River looks positioned to be the appliance operating system Gorilla (noting that the only tornado in that market is WIND's development environment;->). Qualcom could make a big mistake here. If WIND is the appliance gorilla they will be developing a value chain of developers, tools and applications. Those companies will not want to support multiple platforms. In this scenario QCOM becomes the wireless equivalent of the Macintosh. Java will only be a small help because the most important apps will take advantage of the CDMA unique hardware/network/service features. The O/S is the interface to those features. Above that comes 'client side application server'. No clear direction yet but this is where OpenWave seems headed. Above that comes the 'application'. IMO, this is where PalmOS fits. It is much more an application than an operating system. Palm is already incorporating WIND's VxWorks into a future product. It will be interesting to see how they manage the OS/Application split. The basics of tornado marketing say that a tornado requires a killer app. Early market predictions frequently get the killer app wrong (VoD on the Information Superhighway). QCOM wants to build a very broad network of applications and developers. Supporting the industry standard archticture maximizes the network size. In the mean time, there are the simple matters of 'crossing the chasm' and navigating the bowling alley. I predict this will happen in the enterprise not with the consumer. FedEx, UPS, walk up customer service, real time expense reporting, etc... BREW may facilitate this period. That is the long answer to why I am so interested and somewhat worried, about BREW. Thanks to Alan Mitchell on Wind thread