When I first started at Qualcomm decades ago, Irwin and crew's emphasis was always about innovation and pushing the envelope with IS-95. Years later, it was about pushing the envelope with HDR, and then again with OFDMA and its Flarion acquisition.
Now, it's all about bean counting and making wall street's lofty profit targets. Who cares about innovation, when you can hit those numbers in the short term by laying off workers X and hire workers Y that costs less. No need to innovate or push the next big thing. As long as shareholders are happy, the board is happy, and executive management gets their $95million stock grants, that's all that matters. Screw everyone else.
Qualcomm isn't the only company that does this. American companies in general are doing this. It's just sad that tech companies these days care more about how Wall Street and personalities like Carl Icahn thinks than it does about actually trying to bring out the next best innovative products. Not many companies do this anymore. Maybe Google, Apple and Amazon. That's about it.