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

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (129455)	6/1/2003 9:29:27 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 152472

Despite non-economic pressures, superior technology eventually wins. No, not true. There are examples that you can cite where superior technology swung the day. And always technology plays some hand. But in the history of corporate enterprise, the past is littered with more "better" technologies that have never seen the light of day than those which we can cite as having anchored a business' competitive win. While the VHS tape might have "won" because of a two hour play time (this is arguable), this was not because of better technology. It was because of inferior technology!!! By recording less information per unit time on a technology with roughly similar bit-per-cubic-inch characteristics, a longer viewing time per cubic inch was made available. Picture quality suffered, but the business utility (home movie rentals of 1+ hour feature films) was better served. In the end, what matters was Sony listened carefully to what the customers wanted, and packaged a solution to their needs using "inferior" technology. And the consumers preferred the packaging. Microsoft is hardly the planet's bastion of software technology, and nobody can accuse them of leading the state of the art when it comes to operating systems. But they manage to deliver just enough utility to customers at an unbelievable profitability. While no less than two dozen Operating System companies with "better" technology have come and gone. I suppose we can agree however, if you allow me to choose the measure of the word "superior" to be against the needs of the business, rather than intrinsic to the technology itself. Which needs are often entirely non-technical in nature. Such as delivering a grainier picture with lower signal to noise ratio so that we can create the non-existent home-entertainment video rental business with the convenience of one tape instead of two. Regards, John