The Qualcomm Equation: How a Fledgling Telecom Company Forged a New Path to Big Profits and Market Dominance

by Dave Mock

Book Overview

This book reveals crucial but little-known information on the history of cellular and wireless technology -- some of which dates to World War II -- and shows how the company grabbed the wave just as it began to rise.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Qualcomm, through a combination of technological superiority, cunning business acumen, and sheer tenacity, has become the undisputed standard by which telecom companies now...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814409970
• ISBN13: 9780814409978
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Amacom
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Great primer on a great company

I used to work for Qualcomm and found this gave a great historical perspective on the company and its culture. If you work there too or if you want to learn some of the practices of a standout company, this one should be on your list.

Story of how the Telecom Industry was Revolutionized

Dave Mock did an excellent job of giving a good, accurate telling story of how a small start-up company in San Diego revolutionized the telecom industry. The book does not talk so much about the company, the technology, or the business model that made it successful, but rather describes in more narrative manner of the story behind the scenes, its history dating back from decades ago. The book describes in details the numerous technical and business challenges that Qualcomm encountered during the early stages of the endeavor and how the company managed to overcome these obstacles. Although Qualcomm's story is about how CDMA came about, the book is suitable for both the technical and non-technical audiences as it circumspect more about the entrepreneurship side and what made it work for a group of renowned academic individuals in becoming businessmen. The book is suitable for readers in the wireless industry as well as entrepreneurs trying to look for key ingredients in starting a successful company.

An important work on IS-95

In The Qualcomm Equation Dave Mock does an excellent job of reporting the company's technological and financial history. The first half of the book,"The Radical Technology Solution", interweaves different story lines as well as Brooks did when he presented AT & T's complicated history in Telephone. Mock handles well the difficult job of keeping a cogent narrative flowing while discussing different elements: the founders, their funding, the competition, and the technology itself. As with Brooks, Mock is not an employee of the company he writes about, nor is this a corporate sponsored biography. Still, having been granted special access to Qualcomm people and papers, he seems at times too favorable to Qualcomm, jeopardizing the validity of conclusions he draws. Never-the-less, the factual reporting he presents is quite strong; there is information here on CDMA development in mobile telephony not found anywhere else. Part Two: The Intellectual Property Business, explores how IP promotion and control helped Qualcomm become a worldwide company. It's fascinating, to a degree, but I am a technology historian, not a business manager. I feel unable to comment on Part Two's validity but it is obviously well researched. Gripes? A bizarre Foreword from George Gilder. You'll see :-) And a one-sided approach to covering Qualcomm which is perhaps a structural problem; this book wasn't meant to be a comparative history or to tell the story of another company. Q's decision to withhold payment to Korea's ETRI, later overturned in arbitration to the cost of $80 million, for example, could be viewed as a smart decision by Q to save their stockholders money, or a robber-baron like action intent on defrauding a group that had a legitimate right to be paid. A reader of this book can't tell because we don't have ETRI's position. Nor Qualcomm's legal department. The success of Qualcomm may indeed be based on all the positive things Mock tells us, but it also could be founded, in part, on aggressive lawyers and a bankroll big enough to buy out or shut down competition when threatened. Positives? An excellent index. Nice, bright paper. A good bibliography and a detailed time-line. 231 pages of good information. Most important, the arrival of Dave Mock as a first class technology historian. While the history of TDMA based GSM and IS-54/IS-136 is documented in hardcopy and on the web, CDMA based IS-95 has not been covered well until now. This book should be considered an essential title for anyone working in or investigating cellular radio.

If you want to know how Qualcomm became Qualcomm, this is it

Qualcomm is the Microsoft of the telecoms industry, for better and for worse. You either love the company or you hate the company; I'm leaning toward the latter, so please keep this in mind. First, you have to give the company credit for getting to where it is today. Dave Mock does an excellent and meticulous job of documenting Qualcomm's against-all-odds rise to the top of the telecoms industry. I did not realize the degree to which Qualcomm relied on government business in the early days and also did not realize just how close the company came to missing the cellular boat completely. Back when Europe set in place one standard and many in the US wanted to follow suit, Qualcomm stuck to its guns. And I think that the US is better off for it. By and large, the mixed-standards "mess" that we have in the US has turned out to be a pretty good thing. Because of competing standards, we have EV-DO, which is a much-faster technology than single-standard Europe has to offer. Competing technologies keeps everyone on their toes, and Qualcomm has certainly kept the GPRS vendors on their toes. Dave Mock does a great job of documenting this drama and making sense of the very complex technical standards and jargon. Mock is perhaps too kind to Qualcomm, particularly in the latter years, as the vendor transforms from David to Goliath. For example, the company has been in an all-out war with Wi-Fi and WiMAX over the past three years, and it is only recently that we now see the company starting to co-opt some of the same technology underlying WiMAX. Qualcomm recently ditched its much-hyped EVDV technology when it became brutally apparent that carriers want IP and big pipes, something WiMAX was designed to address from the ground up. I find Qualcomm to be a little lost these days, as if it is searching for another big bully to take on again; the trouble is, Qualcomm is now the big bully and it's taking on the types of innovators that it once was. That said, anyone in the telecoms industry who wants to know how Qualcomm got to be Qualcomm should read this book.