[quote=all][quote=AN]No, their problem is not unique and I saw it coming. What’s unique is Steve Mollenkopf’s leadership. When he took over, I felt that this would happen, but wasn’t expecting it to happen this quick and this drastic.[/quote]
Good thing Q did not let M$ steal him.[/quote]
I’m not really sure if Steve is leading Qualcomm in the right direction. It seems like they are exclusively trying to focus on chip and patent….Exclusively on chip is going to be really tough because the edge that Qualcomm had is getting smaller by the day…And Q won’t win a battle against the asian companies when it comes to competing on cost alone. And with the way the industry is heading, the asian companies have caught up. MediaTek is getting really close, and Samsung’s Exynos is gaining much more weight. Samsung also has their own LTE modem in the ATT S6 phones shipped here, which is remarkable, considering how fast Samsung was able to get their LTE modem into a tier 1 customer for the U.S. And MediaTek is now in a a few phones in the U.S. now, specifcally the phones from Alcatel that Tmobile offers ($100 android smart phones)
Product differentiation is getting increasingly difficult for Q, and unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be something significant in the near term to drive growth moving forward. For example, not much going on wrto 5G
The problem is that Qualcomm has done such a great job destroying competition in the past, that there are no other significant employers here that can easily absorb some of the employees with specialized skillset. The choices are Intel (which is in lockdown/cost cutting mode too) and Broadcom (which just exited the LTE business, and just got acquired by a company).
It looks like the asian companies are now dishing out the pain to the Q.
What I found really frightening for engineering minds is that in that restructuring plan presented, if you look at the presentation, all it has are financial and wall street metrics that they want to hit. Almost no information/direction on technological innovation that they plan on doing… If this was a presentation done by Irwin Jacobs, it would have looked drastically different, with the presentation completely on innovation and next generation things. I think the business/wall street folks have finally settled in at Qualcomm, and it’s no longer going to be engineering focused as it once was… And that sucks for engineers.
