There's some inconsistency in your comments, and pointing it out illustrates why this debate was simultaneously very relevant and very irrelevant.
you can't rubbish something from another company that is very likely going to be exactly what your trying to push in a year or twos time.
This first statement is actually correct, and is the reason for the retraction. From a
marketing standpoint, that sort of talk creates a total quagmire.
He obviously has no idea of the technical benefits of moving to ARM's V8 64bit architecture which are manifold. Anyone saying that increased address space is the only benefit of this new architecture also has no idea what they are talking about.
And here's where you start to go off the rails. First off, I don't know the guy's technical background, but I'd be surprised if he's not at least passably aware of the technical benefits. Per my earlier comment, it's important not to confuse marketing with cold hard facts, because the former has quite a spectrum.
Moreover, most of his comments get to the very semantic debate I mentioned in my first post in this thread. Chandrasekher comments, that, "Predominantly... you need it for memory addressability beyond 4GB. That's it. You don't really need it for performance." Well, what is
"it"? What does the word
"need" mean? Do you "need" 64-bit to attain architectural improvements? Not really (although it sure made it a heck of a lot easier). Did a bunch of stuff
come with 64-bit that improved performance? Yup. Note that he goes on to acknowledge that, "From an engineering efficiency standpoint it just makes sense to go do (64-bit)," so it's not like the guy doesn't "get it."
The whole thing was intended to be a carefully worded marketing slam on the use of the term "64-bit", while avoiding mention of the stuff that came along with 64-bit itself. From a short-term marketing strategy, what Chandrasekher said wasn't crazy or inaccurate—but that's the problem. Long-term, that's playing with fire.
People criticizing the guy for not knowing what he's talking about clearly haven't bothered to actually read his words carefully and verbatim. The land mine he stepped on was marketing in nature, not technical.
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It amazes me that comments like that would come from an educated person. It seems that HR has completely failed Qualcomm. The fallout of this is that his ideas have either destroyed morale for his more educated underlings or truly holds the company's evolution at bay.
Oh please, let's not overblow the relevance of this. Have you actually worked at a company with a CMO? This sort of stuff is a non-story anywhere in the world except MacRumors.
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Funny that in the last week the competition had made some really stupid comments. 1st Eric from google and now this guy. Why can they just concentrate on making their own crap instead of slamming others?
Putting aside that I think you are dead-wrong about Chandrasekher's comments being "stupid," the answer to your question is that a key part of marketing is differentiating yourself from the competition, and that often involves debunking various claims. That's Marketing 101 in any business school.