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

To: AlfaNut who wrote (146912)	12/11/2006 1:11:48 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 152472

Alfie, I doubt that Nortel and Sony joined up with QUALCOMM to lose money on infrastructure and handsets and be relegated to nothing. <None of us will ever know if the current situation was QCOM’s original strategy, but most would probably agree that investments in making infrastructure, phones, etc. were necessary up-front in order to launch an entirely new standard. But to think that QCOM could or should have been researcher, chipmaker, phonemaker, content provider and service provider, and grown to be the biggest thing ever….well….I want some of whatever you’re smoking. > I don't think I mentioned content provider - BREW is only a content enabler and QCOM gets a portion of the content so delivered. QCOM also wan't planning on having Leap, Vesper, Pegaso, NextWave and Globalstar lose money. QCOM was expecting them to make money. Or, if not, it was a major corporate fraud and it's time for gaol. With those, QCOM was positioned to be a major shareholder in service provision. I never said they'd be the biggest service provider, but with Globalstar covering the planet, that could be argued - via Vodafone's service provider contract with Globalstar which was a dopey one - I always argued Globalstar should have done an integrated system, not let the demonstrably hopeless service providers who were used to running high-priced oligopolies get control. QCOM formed partnerships in WirelessKnowledge, Wingcast, Cinecom, Graviton, 724 Solutions and other strategic investments to achieve major positions all over the place. Eudora could really have evolved into the key platform for cyberspace - email is what it's all about. We don't need phone numbers, we just need email addresses. That was obvious a decade ago. All those and more were lost opportunities. I don't see any reason to achieve failure. Some, such as WirelessKnowledge, had me baffled - I never knew what it was trying to do. But the others could and should have been great successes. There was nothing wrong with aiming to be the first $1 trillion company. Somebody has to do it. Cyberspace is the place it can happen and will happen. If there never has been <a company being highly vertically integrated in a continuously evolving, technology driven industry and remaining competitive on a long term basis. Nobody has that magic. > I don't see why QCOM couldn't be first. Just as they breached the laws of physics to achieve CDMA, I think they could breach the Law of AlfaNut to achieve that. Anyway, doing research, fabless ASICs, making cyberphones and BREW and the gateway system to access cyberspace, then running service providers is not really "highly vertically integrated". BP Oil buying a construction company, building roads, leasing cars and producing cars and tyres and tolling the roads, as well as finding, producing and refining the oil" WOULD be highly vertically integrated. Bear in mind that QCOM wasn't doing it all on their own. They had Sony and Nortel, both quite significant companies which you might not have heard of, to do a lot of the work in the partnerships. While it's great to have the "pearl in the wireless oyster", with 90% royalty profits, [since dropped with lawyers all over the profits], there's nothing wrong with more prosaic investments too. Eudora could have turned out to be far more important and profitable than the boring old ASICs business. Seen Google and Gmail share price? ASICs and royalties are so last century. Mqurice