To L2V: On the INGENUITY of IDCC Management:
Since NO ONE has responded to your interesting and thoughtful Posts (see #14376 & #15774) suggesting the "cleverness" of IDCC management, to your apparent frustration, and since I have had similar (not identical) thoughts, let me respond.
Jimlur has said, and many others have repeated, that investors in IDCC will eventually be shown to be "idiots or geniuses." It has been my belief that we will only be proven geniuses as investors, if the current Management of IDCC are "geniuses", as it is primarily their vision, strategizing, planning, and implementing of the company's technological potential in a very complex and challenging business environment that fundamentally determines its success as a company and ours as investors.
L2V, your recent posts about IDCC management history and current strategy (as reflected by hints given in the recent ERICY settlement and conference call) echo some of my own posted and non-posted thoughts. In my opinion, those investors who sometimes voice their dislike and distrust of management (for any number of reasons) and claim their investment is primarily based on IDCC technology produced by those employed as inventors, engineers and technologists, have a rather shallow understanding of what makes a successful business.
Your recent portrayal of the long history of IDCC management illustrates this. In the 1980's and early 1990's, many believed in the investment value of IDCC (then known as IMM) 2G technology as reflected in its many patents. But as we now know, the way management wrote and applied for those patents, the way they tried to gain acceptance and recognition for them, and the way they entered into and prosecuted litigation with Motorola in particular revealed some of the terrible failings of management in those years. The longest Longs (especially Loophole) and the Special Master in ERICY vs IDCC have given us some insight into these failings, and the resulting legacy of failings of IDCC 2G inventions to fulfill their promise. So the inventiveness of IDCC (IMM) engineers and technology employees in its early years was insufficient to make the company successful. And the same is true today.
Without the ingenuity of Management, the inventiveness of Employees will be equally ineffective. And, in my opinion, there are plenty of clues to indicate the ingenuity of Management, from moving out of Ultraphone production, seeing beyond BCDMA development to 3G, forming strategic partnerships with Nokia and Infineon, leveraging the company into 3G standardizing committees, negotiating some remarkably complex and subtle contracts, and as L2V indicates in his cited posts, "clauses and provisions in those contracts just turned into something more like high tension steel cables hooked together in a web nobody saw before. Those cables just yanked tight in contracts all over the wireless world ... Nobody realized how all of those contingent clauses might be set up to work as one very carefully constructed and brilliant business strategy." Will this be enough to ensure success of the company? That remains to be seen. In their very detailed full disclosures of the risks for those investing in IDCC, Management shows their full awareness of the many uncertainties with which they must contend. By investing in IDCC, you implicitly express your confidence in Management's ability to wisely navigate those risks.
If you do not have such confidence, it seems to me unwise, indeed foolish, to invest in IDCC. The perpetual Management bashers, it seems to me, have conflicted motives in their investment. It is not unreasonable for long investor's to try to understand as clearly as possible Management policy, practice and goals, to even criticize and second guess it in a responsible and conscientious way. But I have been very critical of those who took it upon themselves, in fits of self-righteous indignation, to undermine, even sabotage Management, by their schemes to complain to and marshall forces against it that are outside the company (like large institutional investors, reporters, analysts, or even the SEC). Hopefully, those days are past, and we can now patiently wait to see how the pieces of this company's puzzle will fall into place. Good luck to all of good will.
Sophist
AI
