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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: q_long who wrote (119119)	5/22/2002 10:01:29 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 152472

Not exactly. QCOM collects 10% of the download price how is that different from what i said ("10% surcharge on each application")? different wording, perhaps. but the same in effect. basically, a 10% tax from the customer's (and app developer's) POV. that does not seem like a good strategy to me if they want BREW to proliferate. again, can you imagine if MSFT had charged 10% surcharge on each of its competitors' apps? if they'd done that, Macintosh would've kicked Wintel's butt. but i will grant you that there are differences between the PC and mobile terminal markets. first of all, you've got the carrier's as a natural tollgate which makes widespread proliferation more difficult. secondly, mobile software platforms are developing in a market which has learned from MSFT's success. it will not be easy for anybody to be the "next MSFT" since everybody knows what that means (unlike IBM back in the days when it unwittingly gave MSFT the keys to its monopoly rents). hence i expect cos like QCOM, MSFT, and NOK to "slug it out" over the years, with nobody doing especially well. however, the excess R&D expenditures may be of benefit to the carriers and customers (if they are cheapened enough, as NOK seems to be cheapening its own key differentiator). check out that WSJ article on NOK i posted the link to last night (front page article in today's paper). quite interesting. i would have liked them to have included QCOM in the discussion.