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

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (12443)	7/16/1998 8:21:00 AM
From: Jon Koplik	Respond to of 152472

Tero - I suspect you will "trash" the general theme of my response, but here goes anyway. A lot of the things that you keep "harping on" about (with the Nokia handsets outperforming their rivals) are (I assume) clearly true, but for me, when certain items I purchase (usually electronic and technical gizmos in general) reach a high level of ease of use, compact size, light weight, etc. then ... I find that further improvements have extremely rapidly declining marginal utility (yes, I studied economics). For example, the last time I ordered a VCR (by mail), when the package arrived, it was so light, I literally thought "Oh no, they accidentally shipped me an empty box!" Well, it was in there; but weighed so little, I could not believe it. BUT, I had absolutely NO complaints about the weight of my previous generation VCR. It was light also, just not as ridiculously light as the new one. If a company advertised "Our new VCR's weigh X, instead of the old Y," my response would be : I just don't care. I know it is better to have a handset battery last longer rather than shorter, but for my own use of my Qualcomm cell phone, having to re-charge the battery once a week maybe is no big deal. (We do not leave it on when we are asleep, among other things). Similarly, the phone is light enough (and small enough) to fit easily in a purse. I know if one is carrying something all day, every gram helps. But, there is a certain point where I think "Who cares?" is the correct operative phrase. I will say it again -- the carriers are the customers of Qualcomm. If someone produces a weightless, micro-handset, but it is part of a money-losing platform for the carriers, it will not induce the carriers to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to install the infrastructure so that consumers can get a "really neat" handset, while the carrier goes bankrupt competing with CDMA carriers. Jon.