The interminable legal squabble between Nokia and Qualcomm has
returned to the US after Qualcomm started involving courts in other jurisdictions such as the UK. In case you missed it the most recent news was that in addition to direct legal action Qualcomm is attacking Nokia in the
US International Trade Commission claiming patent infringement that seems similar to that which it is suing over, and Nokia is one of 6 European manufacturers complaining to Brussels about Qualcomm.
It is extemely unclear who is going to win or indeed whether any winner will show up soon - going on the Rambus litigation this process could take close to a decade to settle - so this particular news is probably not particularly critical, although it seems likely that the critical commercial dispute will have to be settled soon. The root cause appears to be a cross-licensing agreement which is about to expire and where Qualcomm has apparently decided that it wants considerably more for its next contract than Nokia is willing to pay. All the other lawsuits and complaints to the EU, ITC etc. appear to be attempts by one side to put pressure on the other.
All these arguments refer to "old" technology and ways to gain the largest share of the revenue stream from these "old" technologies. Even though the core dispute concerns UMTS which isn't really fully used yet, the more interesting battle probably concerns the next generation of mobile wireless. In that regard it is fascinating to see that Qualcomm seems to be failing in its attempts to repeat its dominance of 3G wireless in the newer generations. Not only did the 802.20 standard pushed primarily by Qualcomm die an ignominious death recently before becoming an official standard, but Qualcomm is also lacking in commercial wins. The recent Sprint WiMAX announcement, which Nokia congratulated it on despite it, to my mind, looking more like a win for Motorola, may well be a sign. The major operators seem to be unimpressed with Qualcomm's business practices even if it turns out to have better technology. It is of course hard to be sure but it may well be that the merging of WiBRO with WiMAX turns out to be the key to WiMAX success and longer term to Qualcomm failure. After all with WiMAX high speed data roaming should now be possible in all major markets and none of the WiMAX/WiBRO technology seems to need a Qualcomm royalty payment, thus it may well be that WiMAX turns out to be cheaper than 3G and offer higher bandwidth.
In the future perhaps business historians will use Qualcomm as an example of how not manage a patent portfolio.
