The core WiFi team did some good work started by CRD in 2009 in partnership with QCT - 11ac mu mimo and WiFi son, making boat loads of $$.
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Or..creating a 100 man project to replace Bluetooth.
Crd did some good work, but many projects were eventually shut down because it didn’t have the scale of msm on day 1. They should have spun off these projects with equity share and created several Nervanas. Let’s not forget nervana (machine learning) was acquired for 400m by Intel — this was a crd project shut down, engineers left crd and started their own company. Another misplaced priority issue is the desire to kill WiFi- instead of starting 5g back in 2010, they were busy trying to Kill WiFi - two LTEU flavors, an LAA, multefire, etc etc..Trying to find a home for every Old “EV DO” club VP to lead projects, including a WiFi project by replacing leads with vast WiFi experience.
PJ stepped down due to his affair and divorce proceedings. SM getting Microsoft is a rumor created to divert attention from PJ’s situation
I agree with last post .you laid it out nicely. shows people how things went wrong.
It was inevitable. Q had a great idea with CDMA and won the standards battle pretty much. Explosive growth followed. HelI, even most people in second and third world countries were buying smart phones. Making huge amounts of money was easy in that period. But everything at some point becomes more of a commodity and management for growth in that environment is a far more difficult task.
Productivity and cost cutting become the primary means of achieving profit growth in mature markets. PJ had his issues. The real problem was not understanding the basic problem of transitioning from an explosively growing to a mature one. Mediaflow was “the next big thing,” but turned out to be a big lose. R&D engineers let loose to pursue “out of the box” ideas also wasted money. Only recently has management been forced to accept a new paradigm. One where productivity and cost cutting we’re more important than trying to recreate the huge idea that CDMA was.
If anything, the failure was in not being draconian with cost cutting. Sad to say, but there should have been large scale lay offs and more out-sourcing done quite some time ago. Expecting to come up with another huge idea was a far more satisfying course.
Good luck to all. For those of you who missed the golden years of Q, I hope you can find something similar in another niche, but it’s very unlikely you’ll ever find anything like what happened at Q during the late 90’s.
PJ got paid to step down in order to pay SM not to go to MS, which now has 7x market cap of Q. Oopsies
When the company sold off infrastructure and phone and put all focus on making chips and IP.
Now Q is struggling to diversify in a crowded space using largely third world engineers, because chips and IP are no longer a monopoly in a saturated market.
PJ then at a rapid rate with SM