By the time you get to see this, I’ll probably be in Barcelona. It’s the cellular show for people who aren’t US mobile chip giant Qualcomm, though I’m expecting a massive Qualcomm presence, even so.

The mystery about Qualcomm is why it finds it so hard to understand that it is not loved – even when it’s obvious to everyone else. I mean, when you meet Qualcomm execs, they are at great pains to explain that, if you prick them, they bleed... and then seem astonished at the stampede of engineers waving hat-pins in an enthusiastic way.

An old friend of mine started up a firm and spent years trying to get traction in various Eastern European markets. After a while, the orders started rolling in, and the next thing he knows, he’s been bought by Qualcomm. And all of a sudden, nobody will have anything to do with him.

Latest absurdity: a whole bunch of money has been pushed across the Euro border, designed to sponsor Qualcomm licensees. Expensive phones from Samsung are being given to operators. They are, of course, destined for box-splitters (people who take phones with pre-pay SIMs in, and set them up to dial into their own premium phone numbers until the cash is all transferred) and then to be dumped on the shelves of high-street shops.

It’s just like its digital rights management push. Qualcomm pretends to be a firm hand, aiming to protect the small inventor when in fact, nobody believes it’s anything other than a naked attempt to acquire patents by hook, crook or distressed-assets sale. In due course, the firms that own all this DRM “intellectual property” will find that they are being systematically ignored by the new-growth territories, where their patents are invalid, and their technology is reverse-engineered.

And outside those areas, industrial growth will be a memory, and nobody will be in the slightest bit interested in doing deals with someone who actually doesn’t seem to care if their customers can make a profit or not. Meanwhile, the trolls in the billing department carry on sending out royalty statements, without any interest in what the royalties are for, or what they are worth. Yes, it seems to keep the shareholders happy – but what Qualcomm wants is to be loved. It’s just not going to happen, guys.