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

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (129495)	6/3/2003 12:15:55 PM
From: Jeff Vayda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

John: R&D expenses are not linear, nor are they necessarily related to the position they are applied along the development path. The development path itself is not even linear! Your observation of - early in the evolution some dollar amount provides larger benefits than the same dollar amount later - misses the "Ah Ha!" factor. I would suggest the linear, planned, predictable, actually executed plan is a very small minority of development stories. I have no problem with Qualcomm throwing so much money down rat holes. You can never tell which rat hole will return the gem which launches entirely new lines of business. That said, there must be a balance and that is what I pay the management to provide. Sometimes it is appropriate to swing for the fence, no matter what your sunk costs are to date. Jeff Vayda

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (129495)	6/3/2003 12:23:48 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

It costs the same amount of R&D to cut the cost of something from $20 down to $10 as it does to cut that same thing down from $200 to $100 further up the evolutionary path. Shannon's Law?

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (129495)	6/3/2003 5:31:10 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 152472

<everybody benefits from Moore's law. But not uniformly> John, that's what I thought I was labouring. CDMA needs lots of processing power. CDMA gets a bigger bang for the buck than does GSM. CDMA as planned can only work with more powerful processing in lower cost ASICs. 2005 is targeted for those 7000 processors to be mainstream, not before. qualcomm.com It'll take that long for the processor technology to be ready for the processing demanded. Analogue phones also benefit from Moore's Law. But not as much as CDMA does. Same with GSM. GSM does better with a doubling of processing power, but it still can't squeeze more into the spectrum. CDMA has the advantage of the processing power, which is essential to CDMA high speed data processing along with voice as well as the spectrum efficiency which allows sufficient data to be moved to give the processing power something to do. We are a long way from 'why bother?' Getting radioOne into CDMA cut the bill of materials a lot, which helps. But the cyberphones I'd like to buy are still non-existent and those that do exist, with limited functionality, are horrendously expensive. I need more of Moore, lots of Metcalfe and miles of economies of scale. When we have 2 billion CDMA users sharing development costs, we'll be able to really make mobile cyberspace hum. We'll start to shout down the microwave background radiation the Big Bang allegedly created. Please have another go at explaining to me why Moore's Law is bad for QUALCOMM and good for the competition. I understand the diminishing returns idea. The oil industry research we did on fuel quality tended to be microscopically beneficial rather than quantum leap stuff. I used to be the one in favour of ditching research [some of it anyway]. Mqurice PS: I suspect that really, that microwave background is lots of those who have gone before, chatting across the cosmos, using pulsed monocycles and quantum computing processing to pick out the bits they want to see. Or, since they are a few steps ahead on the technological revolution, perhaps they use Gaussian noise degaussing with neutrino filtration rather than CDMA.