They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that a bar
To any watch they keep?
-- "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" by Robert Frost, 1936
In this tribute to National Poetry Month, my favorite poet laureate looked at people on a beach always watching the waters. But he might as well have written these words about Wall Street analysts, always eager to predict the future to totally unreasonable levels of precision.
Nowhere would Frost's observation be more appropriate than in the ever-changing market for mobile computing. Heading into Wednesday's second-quarter report, mobile-chip powerhouse Qualcomm
Of course, many of these adjustments were reactions to the new Apple
For example, HTC's new flagship phone was designed around the mighty NVIDIA
That's just one example of Qualcomm's long, insidious fingers. Samsung even replaced a processor designed by Sammy itself with a Snapdragon to comply with T-Mobile USA's high-speed network. If that's not a vote of confidence in Qualcomm's products, I don't know what is.
So analysts keep ratcheting up their estimates for Qualcomm, yet they tend to fall short of the real results. Qualcomm has beaten earnings targets in each of the past four quarters and will probably do it again this week. It's hard to come up with a better horse to play in the trillion-dollar arms race of mobile computing than Qualcomm. Learn more about the mobile revolution in this special report, but grab your copy right away, because it won't be free forever.