Paul Jacobs, chief executive ofQualcomm, said that buying Android wouldn’t have been a good idea a few years ago because it would have made his company too powerful.
Already a powerhouse in chips and cell-phone radio technology, acquiring Android before Google did might seem like a great extension of Qualcomm’s business, which could produce everything from chips to software for mobile devices.
And in retrospect, it seems like a missed opportunity: Google executiveDavid Lawee said earlier today that the Android acquisition was the company’s most successful deal ever.
But Jacobs, speaking at the 16th annualStanford Accel Symposiumat Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., today, said during a question and answer session that the acquisition of Android might have led the company’s partners to conclude that Qualcomm would be too powerful as the go-to company for cell-phone technology and allow it to dictate standards. That could well have limited support for Android, whose rapid adoption today looked like far from a sure thing just a few years ago.
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