To: chris714 who wrote (15308 ) 7/8/2002 10:01:06 AM From: Art Bechhoefer Respond to Chris, yes, there is a certain similarity, but there are also key differences. QUALCOMM was not the only company with an interest in Globalstar. Loral supplied the actual operations personnel, and Vodafone had charge of operating the gateways (individual base stations communicating with the satellites), including billing. Loral and Vodafone saw Globalstar as nothing more than a Cadillac style wireless phone system capable of being used anywhere in the world. They assumed customers such as company personnel in remote areas and executives demanding the highest reliability and very good privacy protection would constitute the market, and they were wrong. So far the only real market for Globalstar (people willing to pay extra for reliability) are law enforcement and emergency medical teams. But Vodafone has little interest in this group and Loral has pretty much written off its entire business other than building communication satellites. To make a long story short, Globalstar failed, in my view, simply because the people who were running it were incapable of understanding its market.
