Carlos Domingo's personal rumblings

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He tenido la suerte de atender varios keynotes de Steve Jobs desde su vuelta a Apple a finales de los 90. Es una experiencia única, mas concierto de rock que conferencia de tecnología. He visto como Apple pasaba de la casi quiebra a la empresa mas valiosa del mundo. Y, desgraciadamente, también he asistido al deterioro físico de Jobs debido a su lucha contra el cáncer que ayer terminó perdiendo.

Soy fan de los productos de Apple, los tengo casi todos. Pero mi pasión no es gratuita. Debido a mi trabajo, pruebo muchas alternativas. Pero siempre vuelvo a Apple porque, sencillamente, son los mejores productos del mundo en sus categorias. Y de eso ha sido responsable Jobs con su visión de las necesidades del consumidor y su pasión por la excelencia del producto y la atención al detalle que ha permeado a todo lo que hace Apple.

Con su muerte, perdemos a un visionario y a un genio creativo pero también a un gran directivo que tuvo el arrojo de cerrar multitud de proyectos y centrarse en unas pocas grandes apuestas con éxito.

Como dice en su ya famoso discurso en Stanford, tienes que encontrar lo que amas. Y él lo encontró en crear grandes productos. Y yo en usarlos.

Carlos Domingo

I just read this very interesting article claiming that Motorola out of the well publicized numer of 17,000 patents that they have, they only have 18 that might be valuable to Google. Although that might seem ridiculous, it might not be very far off. If you look at how many GSM essential patents are out there (the ones that get IPR money for handsets and network equipment and which numbers are publicly available), they were 561 with Motorola at that time having a share of 11% (companies like Nokia had 33% and Ericson 22%, Motorola was third and fourth was Qualcomm with 7%. So that is 61 patents. But that is GSM so possibly not relevant for 3G and the smartphone business and therefore Android. Now if we look at the numbers of the 3G WCDMA IPR distribution, we can see that there  are 1888 essential patents in the patent pool that covers 90% of the patents and Motorola share has dropped to 2%, so 37 patents. That might be more relevant for Android. On 3G, the bigger patent holder is Qualcomm (35% of the total pool) followed by Ericsson (16%) and Nokia (14%). Samsung (which is one of the companies that theoretically that acquisition protects, if not the most important one considering their leading Android market share) has actually 5% of the pool, more than Motorola. If we look at future, meaning, the LTE joint IPR share declaration from late 2010, Motorola does not show up on the top list lead by Interdigital (21%), Qualcomm (19%), Huawei (9%) and yes, Samsung (8%). Motorola is somewhere burried in the 22% of others (I do not have the breakdown for those but it has to be under 5% for anyone there. So whatever IPR Motorola holds, it seems to be not very large for present (3G) and future patent (LTE) patent pools and it seems smaller than Samsung, the main company that this deal is suppose to protect. If patents is all what interests Google, perhaps they should have bought Interdigital that is up for sale and currently trades at around $3BB market cap. Or perhaps there is more than patents.