Bad MEN Of Wireless

justbeatit wrote to us with an article from Red Herring about the bad MEN of Wireless. MEN, of course, means Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia.

Why are we suprised by this?

[fatwreckfan]

I'm sorry, but I'm getting tired of hearing how this company or that company is stifling innovation. We should expect this by now.

Every company in a position of power in their particular market will do whatever they can to stay in that position.

Are we really suprised that Microsoft isn't the only company in the world that likes to choke out its competition?

So whats new....

[h4mmer5tein]

It's business, and big business at that. What MEN are doing is nothing more than standard commercial tactics. Dubious ones admittedly, but nothing that hasnt been done before or will be done again in the future.

The continuous pressures from the stock markets, share holders and investors to keep stock prices high means that companies are venturing further and further into the grey areas of business practice in order to achive and maintain high stock valuations.

Controlling technology is just another way of doing what Enron, Westcomm and KPNQWest did though dodgy financing. In this case its not quite as effective in terms of boosting share prices in the short term, but it's a whole lot more legal.

Childish whining

[mlofroos]

The Red Herring article quotes "complaints", "claims" and other loosely justified attacks on the companies, which, quite frankly, border on slander. At the same time, many are missing a crucial point; it's not MEN that are making technological mischoices so much as the carriers.

If I had a grocery store and customers wanted to buy yesterday's bananas, then, by Jove, that's what I'd be selling them!

On the lighter side, how about this for an acronym: Siemens, LUcent Technologies, Nortel Networks?

Re:Thats

[Jacer]

It's a chicken-and-the-egg argument. Is money evil for luring us, or are we evil for our love of it.

Red Herring Indeed

[mellifluous]

I think the facts here are much simpler - the economy is down, and all of these companies are suffering. Even Nokia's stock is a small fraction of its peak despite consistent profitability. They aren't deploying new technologies as fast as some would like because these things all cost money (surprise!). Believe me, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson, would all love to deploy new technologies because it would drive equipment renewal. In fact, all of these companies have been moving towards licensing more of their technology, so that others can develop upon it.

The article has it backwards: These three all rely on product renewal for growth.

Author's talking out his butt

[Tschepsit]

The author has got quite a few of the supporting "facts" in his articles wrong, not to mention the fact that his conclusions are all backwards. From the inside of at least part of a wireless infrastructure division of MEN, things are going faster and more frantic with shorter product cycles just over the past couple years. The earlier comment was dead-on, profits for MEN are driven by upgrades to new technology, not by expanding existing networks. Ripping out all that 2G and 2.5G hardware and replacing it with backward-compatible 3G hardware is a pretty profitable enterprise, and the prospect of doing the same thing to convert the network backhaul to packet/IP is also lucrative.