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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (7665)	8/24/2001 6:02:25 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

hi Maurice Winn, People don't like that. It reduces the value of their phones to them. In other countries the person making the call pays. i have read this argument many times and find it silly. with mobile penetration in the US now rising, i think most users don't know which minutes they pay for and which they don't. this is due in large part to the fact that minutes are quite cheap. there can be little doubt that a single digital standard aligned with the rest of the world (GSM) would have benefitted cellphone penetration in the US. however, it would not have benefitted QCOM or QCOM investors. QCOM's performance in 1999 ranks as the most remarkable ever by a US large-cap, perhaps by any large-cap. i imagine it is on the order of six or seven sigmas. QCOM investors during that time, including myself, must be personally grateful for the hodge-podge of standards and resulting infrastructure redundancies and poor economies of scale in the US. for the US as a whole, however, i see no benefit. If QUALCOMM didn't exist, most handsets in the USA would be sold by Nokia and they would be GSM. well, QCOM does exist, but most handsets in the US are sold by NOK in spite of that, although they are mostly TDMA instead of GSM (i.e., NOK is the overwhelming market-share leader in the US). NOK, as you probably know, is the only handset manufacturer in the world that is profitable. at least some of its success may be attributed to its focus on the combo of GSM/TDMA platforms, leaving the much smaller CDMAone platform as sloppy seconds for the second- and third-tier wannabes. most handsets in the USA would be sold by Nokia and they would be GSM. That would make the USA much poorer. Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel would also be selling a lot. CDMA saved the USA. bless your heart, Maurice Winn! that is the funniest thing i've heard in a long time.