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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DaveMG who wrote (667)	6/5/1998 9:53:00 AM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

Dave, The Nordic companies have been doing research on CDMA for most of this decade. Just because they chose not to commercialize it doesn't mean that they don't have valid claims on W-CDMA. I don't think anyone outside of Qualcomm thinks that demanding 5% licensing fees on W-CDMA and then threatening to block the whole proposal if it is not made compatible with IS-95 is reasonable behaviour from Qualcomm. All this talk about how aggressive Ericsson is still leaves me wondering how come people don't see how hostile Qualcomm behaviour has been. People living in America naturally get only Qualcomm's point of view. From European POW, Qualcomm has been attempting to block W-CDMA from day one, first with ridiculous fee demands and now these compatibility demands. There is something decidedly leechlike in this behaviour in my opinion. I'm not trying to convert anyone. I'm just presenting my opinion as clearly as possible and I think that the views on mobile business in general in Silicon Investor tend to be way unbalanced, because 95% of the posters are American. If you think that my calling Qualcomm "parasitic" is surprisingly venomous, how about those "GSM nazi" comments and those endless "socialistic Scandianavia" slurs regularily regurgitated by Qualcomm enthusiasts? How come that is humor but any Qualcomm criticism is venom? Have you often challenged people for using references of nazism and communism in connection with Ericsson and Nokia? I think there's a clear double standard in how you can use semi-racist insults against foreign companies but if somebody dares to suspect the business strategy of an American firm it is instantly condemned as nationalistic bias. Just how bad altering the chip rate would be is still not clear, but I don't think it would be fair to countries that adopted the GSM to suffer from being forced to accommodate all other standards in the 3G solution. Microsoft doesn't have to make their new Windows compatible with Apple OS just because Apple had 12% of the world market share. If Qualcomm can prove that it really owns some of the patents it is entitled to some revenue. But so far its behaviour shows the company is not acting in good faith. You're right about Iridium, it's going to be real interesting to see how they sell a phone that costs three times as much as a new PC and weighs five times as much as a normal mobile phone. Call rates won't help them, either. Tero