How To Lose The WiFi Market: Forget That Competition Exists
from the um.-competition? dept
Agere, a spinoff of Lucent (itself a spinoff of AT&T), helped define and create the WiFi market, but now holds a fairly small portion of the market, and is the number five seller of WiFi chips. In taking a look at how Agere "lost" the WiFi market, it simply appears that they weren't ready for competition from plenty of other companies -- including a company with a lot more money: Intel. While the article makes some suggestions (confusion after spinning off their WiFi product business to focus on just chips, taking their eye off the ball to focus on not going bankrupt), the more realistic explanation simply seems to be that they didn't expect as much competition in the marketplace as they received. If anything, it sounds like, by "inventing" the market, they expected to keep it forever. They also seem particularly miffed at Intel's marketing campaign to co-opt WiFi into their Centrino brand -- leading many people to believe that Intel created WiFi. When you're blaming your competitor's ability to outmarket you as the reason you lost a market (especially when it's an emerging market), it suggests the company simply wasn't prepared to compete at all.
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Agere
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Intel doesn't care much about compatibility, either
We are an ISP, and serve some apartment complexes and coffeehouses that have Wi-Fi hotspots and access points. As we have learned after many tech support calls from frustrated users, if you have a Centrino laptop, you will likely find that you cannot use many Wi-Fi hotspots.
Our users have reported these problems again and again to Intel, as has my wireless ISP. But Intel's tech support apparently is set up to assume that any and al problems will be the fault of the user; they're just plain not equipped to receive reports of an actual bug in their product! When we've tried to get the issue esclated, we're told that we should call the manufacturer of the laptop that's having the problem and have them complain to Intel. But our company doesn't own any Centrino-based laptops (for this very reason), so this is nothing but a runaround.
As a result, our ISP can only warn users that if they buy a Centrino-based laptop, they'll probably have to keep a separate Wi-Fi adapter (a PCMCIA card or a USB Wi-Fi adapter) handy if they want to be sure to connect. In my opinion, Intel should not be allowed to call its Centrino chips "Wi-Fi" until they fix this frustrating incompatibility.
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