Thread regarding Qualcomm Inc. layoffs

Qualcomm spends 40 billion or so and acquires ARM to bolster it's royalties/patent portfolio. And no, qualcomm massive layoff won't crater north county real estate. Not many QC engineers can afford to live their now these days anyway, so the majority of folks in North County aren't QC engineers, unless they are a dual income household, or an exec which won't be affected by a layoff. Biotech companies like Illumina have been doing much better than QC. Ditto could be said for doctors and lawyers that live in North County. Just saying. The 820 better run circles around Samsung's app processor. The entire purpose of buying Atheros was to have a one-platform strategy of LTE Modem+Snapdragon+connectivity and lock out other vendors. Until we can get back in there, we're going to have a tough time selling just part of the solution at Samsung because with the exception of Snapdragon and LTE modem, the rest of our stuff is so-so (not best in class). It probably explains why those "other' companies actually had a great quarter: NXP/Broadcom/Intel. Hardware/chip sale is starting to saturate. The bulk of the innovation has already happened, with successive iterations more like "refinement" than breakthrough. This isn't a Qualcomm specific problem. It's industrywide. So, the next step is, all the "me too" players are going to try to compete on cost. When the differentiator between the best solution and the next best solution is not that significant, it's a big problem for the market leaders because we stand to lose market share to cheaper but "good enough solutions". Again, this isn't a Qualcomm specific problem, but industrywide. The only difference between Qualcomm and other semi conductor companies is that we were able to keep our exclusivity on LTE/app processor much longer than most other players in their respective segments. But now, we're going through exactly what every other semi company has gone through. Every other semi company that plays in the space is already doing the best they can to diversify beyond the smartphone/tablet market because everyone knows that the writing is on the wall in terms of growth. That's why there is this big push into IOT and automotive by every player. But, I think the bulk of the growth isn't going to be from chips, it's going to be the software. And unfortunately, Steve dumped/is dump most of the software innovation team here at QC, because he wants to focus exclusively on chip. Personally, I think that's a bad idea, since software is what is going to sell hardware when the market starts to saturate, but then again, he must know best.