Qualcomm: Contrarians at the gate

What is the dominant wireless company today? Nokia? Motorola? Ericsson? No - it's Qualcomm.

Irwin Jacobs, Qualcomm's founder, once told me that when he started the company, he thought it would be a small consulting firm working on interesting problems for the communications industry. Today, Qualcomm has 9,300 employees and sales of more than $7 billion.

To understand Qualcomm's success, forget about studying corporate structure. Study evolutionary biology instead, because that's what Qualcomm exemplifies - and its new strain looks hardier than its impressive first strain.

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What is the dominant wireless company today? Nokia? Motorola? Ericsson? No - it's Qualcomm.

Irwin Jacobs, Qualcomm's founder, once told me that when he started the company, he thought it would be a small consulting firm working on interesting problems for the communications industry. Today, Qualcomm has 9,300 employees and sales of more than $7 billion.

To understand Qualcomm's success, forget about studying corporate structure. Study evolutionary biology instead, because that's what Qualcomm exemplifies - and its new strain looks hardier than its impressive first strain.

Who do you think the boys at Intel worry about when they aren't making themselves sick over AMD? Trust me, it's Qualcomm, which is one of the 20 largest semiconductor companies - and semiconductors aren't even its real business.

Remember Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), the standard Qualcomm pushed to the wireless carriers 10 years ago? Back when the wireless carriers were struggling with 2G, Qualcomm understood that the world would soon need 3G and CDMA could handle more conversations in limited bandwidth than anything else. The cool thing about Qualcomm is the businesses it gets out of - it sold its base station business to Ericsson and its cell phone business to Kyocera. Why get caught in the murk of dreary manufacturing when your real business is packaged brain power, building platforms for everyone else?

Think of Qualcomm as kind of a wireless Bell Labs - but with the commercial instincts of Bill Gates. Qualcomm gets a license fee from all the wireless industry because of CDMA. This license fee is the engine that funds everything else Qualcomm does. This gets competitors angry - it's bad enough when a company outengineers you, but when they've developed a better economic model as well, that's downright unfair.

Qualcomm's new president is Paul Jacobs, Irwin's son. He doesn't accept the conventional wisdom that cellular phones are doomed to a second-class existence behind wired phones in terms of performance. He wants to make your cell phone capable of not only receiving and sending live television signals, but he also sees your cell phone as a first-aid kit, one that reads your basic biometric data. He sees you using electronic money that's stored on your cell phone.