[whynot-123]

I question who this article is for - having worked at Qualcomm, they beat you over the head on how their business is built on patents and how they were going to go belly up some 20 years ago had they not pivoted to this model. I can't imagine a single analyst or anyone interested in the company not aware of their business model in the same way it doesn't take long to figure out that Apple is in the business of selling iPhones, mac books, etc.

[er4hn]

I think this is valuable for those outside of Qualcomm to understand why they have the role that they do in the mobile space. Having worked there as well I have two observations:

- So much of that wall of patents was undergrad level CS concepts with ", for mobile device" tacked on the end. Paraphrasing, don't sue me (kidding..), but that was the gist of it.

- Their actual development process was pretty bad. I submitted a bug fix within the first few weeks I was there. Due to their CI process being entirely manual and very broken I was informed nearly a year later that my fix did not work. This tied in pretty well with my department being told they had a "budget"[1] of lines of code they could change and that budget being pretty limited.

Overall I left with an impression that they were mostly there to license very old technology and make money from patents. Maybe their hardware team was better, I couldn't say.

[1] Most of the effort of our team was spent debugging crash dumps determined to be in "our" part of the code. Nearly all of these were caused by other teams calling into an API we maintained with a null function pointer that "our" code would call. When I asked if we could refactor the API to return an error code if the function pointer was null I learned about the "code budget" and how it would cost too much to refactor.

[shuckles]

Really incredible stuff. Thank you for sharing. Reminds me to continue losing sleep at night over baseband software.

[senderista]

About a decade ago I had to help with due diligence on a potential acquirer in the San Diego area. Qualcomm was the largest tech employer there and from the developers I talked to they seemed to have a terrible reputation at least among software folks.

[acdha]

Around the turn of the century I was working for a web development company there and we had done clients Qualcomm was approaching for J2ME apps - the kind of stuff we take for granted now, but clearly potentially of interest. I took a look at their developer docs and it looked pretty gruesome – far behind even the 90s web on almost everything – but it was the only game in town for a lot of phones.

One of our sales guys was working with a now-famous brewery & they were interested in a mobile friendly store locator since they had far less distribution back then. I tossed together a basic PoC using a crude geolocation system which worked well enough and we were thinking it might be worth trying. A while later they started to respond to our questions on pricing – which started at $50k per carrier for the privilege of being offered for sale, plus over half of the sale price, and that was the floor: they wanted to see the corporate balance sheet so they could decide on an acceptable percentage of their TOTAL revenue, even if most of it had nothing to do with mobile sales. Everyone said “haha, no!”, and dropped it.

[whatshisface]

I guess it's for me, I've never worked at Qualcomm.

[afandian]

You may find this episode of the Acquired Podcast interesting. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/acquired/id1050462261?...

[jomohke]

(slightly) more platform neutral link: https://overcast.fm/+_ztydHHNo

[gota]

Do you recall what kind of bonuses they award to patent authors, if any?

Seems like the message behind 'this is core to our business' is easily communicated with financial incentives backing that up.

[verditelabs]

I got one patent while I was a Qualcomm for some fairly inconsequential software thing. I was awarded $3k USD. Had the patent been filed in other countries and awarded, I would have been awarded I think 1.5k USD per country. This is/was the standard deal at Qualcomm when I was there (2013-2021). I would not be surprised if core researchers are awarded more for stronger and more applicable patents.

[antonvs]

The headline doesn't cover the main thrust of the article, which is:

> "...like other semiconductor majors, the San Diego-based company also protects its inventions with intellectual property. But Qualcomm has a unique model at the heart of the way it uses those patents"

The article dives into that model.

[Scoundreller]

When was that? They had naming rights to a Major League Baseball & football stadium from ‘97 to 2017. Maybe good for recruitment but seemingly pointless on the consumer side to maintain the contract:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Stadium

But I get it that in sports, sometimes the big cheques are written because you can.

[fbdab103]

>Also in 1997, the facility was renamed Qualcomm Stadium after Qualcomm Corporation paid $18 million for the naming rights.[8] The naming rights belonged to Qualcomm until 2017, after which the rights were purchased by San Diego County Credit Union.

Surprisingly cheap! Not that I think it is a good use of money, but less ostentatious than I expected.

[londons_explore]

I assume naming rights would cost a certain amount per year.... Not be something you can buy and then potentially resell later for more money.

[Scoundreller]

Pretty sure most sponsors would include an exit clause just in case. Sure there would be penalties, but if the stadium can re-lease for more, they should play ball.

[daniel_grady]

Absolutely. There’s no secret here.