- 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.
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.
Seems like the message behind 'this is core to our business' is easily communicated with financial incentives backing that up.
> "...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.
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.
Surprisingly cheap! Not that I think it is a good use of money, but less ostentatious than I expected.