Since I've been a little busy the last couple of days, Eric preempted quite a bit of the commentary/links that I was going to provide in answering your questions. I will still come up with a post of my own....but I decided that I'd answer your last question separately right now.
Interesting and if feel important discussion, irrespective of your uncustomary accusatory tone
snip.....
From my fairly close observation of the industry over the past 7 years or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Qualcomm/ CDMA camp have been infinitely more trustworthily and upfront with the investment community than the competition GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/UMTS/3GSM camp has.
Do you not also find that to be the case?
My views on Qualcomm's management have been pretty consistent and unchanging since I first invested. I see them as brilliant, hard-working, and generally honest. The Qualcomm story of how they managed to take an idea from conception to test product to part of the dominant worldwide standard should be part of every tech manager's MBA education. It is why I have entrusted quite a bit of my net worth to Q's management.
However, I would never use the phrase "infinitely more trustworthy". I have invested a much smaller portion of my money with TI for a number of years. They also have a first-rate management team. They made a number of strategic decisions in the mid '90's that allowed them to shed their slow growing businesses to focus on DSP's....which they have come to dominate. During the downturn, TI is the only tech company that I know of that correctly forecast the turnaround of the technology sector (and never gave a false positive). Compare that to Cicso, Intel, or Siebel who every couple of quarters would say business was getting better and then turn out to be wrong.
What they dont have is a CDMA patent portfolio that insures a steady stream of royalty revenues for the next 10 years. I also think that few analysts have looked at what could be a very likely loss of marketshare in wireless as the transition occurs from GSM to W-CDMA.
In any case, I believe that I have answered your questions as to how I view the respective management teams. I would hope you could answer a couple of mine.
During the time you have followed Qualcomm, have you ever posted anything critical of Q's strategy/management? Perhaps you have and I have missed it. However, from my perspective, you consistently paint the company in a positive light. Much of the time, that is warranted, but it becomes hard to discern when this is true if you are willing to put a positive spin on just about any info that comes your way. This becomes even more difficult when you are posting from off-line material that you have obtained.
Conversely, is there anything that you have ever posted that could be construed as complementary to the competition? They are doing a couple of things right...any discussion of Qualcomm can only be helped when we get a decent understanding of the competition.
I compare some of what happens on message boards to the way I am when I am sitting in the left field bleachers at Wrigley. The ump is always out to screw the Cubs, the fans of the other teams are total idiots, and I have never had anything nice to say about the other teams left fielder.
We all have our biases. I am probably viewed as too sympathetic towards TI and Nokia on this board. OTOH, on Nokia boards, I have received some pretty blistering PM's talking about my bias towards Qualcomm. I try to limit those biases to the best of my abilities.....it ends up interfering with our ability to make investing decisions if we "hate" the other companies that are competing or if we "love" the company we am invested in. IMO, it also lessens the utility of message boards when everybody has an entrenched position that they are only looking to defend.
My initial posts were accusatory and not the best way to get my point across....probably just the result of frustration. Of course, after rereading this long rambling post I'm not entirely sure that this post is much different. However, it is probably the best that I can do. The only reason that I even post this is that I think your posts have a ton of useful information in them.
Of course, you are entirely within your rights to tell me to take my observations and go shove it <g>.
Slacker
AI
