Can Qualcomm avoid repeating Motorola's fate?

NPR had an interesting guest this morning: Edward Luce, author of “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent”. I’m not about to turn SemiWiki into a politics blog, but there is some precedent in the technology business. I’ve caught myself saying more than once recently that “Motorola is no longer the company I worked 14 years for.”

I started thinking about the decline of Motorola and the history of Qualcomm, and realized these two companies are not only intertwined, but on parallel paths with Qualcomm a few years behind in the sequence of events. (We follow the Qualcomm timeline from a chance meeting between founders in 1959 to present day in Chapter 9 of “Mobile Unleashed”.) Here are several similarities I see:

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