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.
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.
