No-Charge Licensing

With this thinking in mind, Ericsson approached several manufacturers of portable electronic

devices (both phones and computers) to discuss the development and the promotion of this

new short-range radio technology. As the talks progressed, Ericsson discovered that they

could best achieve their goals by abandoning a traditional licensing strategy and instead

offering free licenses to any company that embraced the new technology.

This turned out to be a very smart move; by making the technology freely available to others,

Ericsson encouraged faster development of the technology and persuaded a large number of

companies to jump on the new technology’s bandwagon. This strategy also forestalled the

development of any competing wireless standards, thus averting any potential “VHS vs. Beta”

standards wars.