InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[ed_ferrari]

ranger, I think you're comparing apples and oranges. I believe the "errors in strategy or design" in that article is referring to building the end product i.e. phones. This can be things like what kind of plastic housing should the innards of the phone go into; what languages should the user interface support, how should the chips be mounted on the circuit boards, etc. In other words, things that are changable at production time.

I think what Nokia is referring to is things that affect the front end of the process (i.e. the design of the "guts" of the phone). As an extreme example, let's say that Nokia decided that IDCC had some IPR that would cause them to want to give up on GSM and instead only produce CDMA phones. The design changes that would need to be made for this would take years to implement. Now think of it on a lesser scale... like say Nokia was planning on producing phones that used some antenna technology that IDCC had the IPR for. If Nokia needed to design around that, it would take a whole new board layout, as well as months of testing before they could take it to production. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that I think Nokia is referring to.