Author Archives: Jean-Louis Gassée

Apple Post-Quartum Thoughts

January 29, 2012 – 8:09 pm

TweetAs if you haven’t heard, Apple posted its Q4 earnings last week. I’ll spare you my own encomium and refer you to these links: Despite its title, Business Insider’s list of Facts About Apple’s Business That Will Blow Your Mind contains little or no hype. TechCrunch provides context for Apple’s “massive numbers”. Brian Hall offers [...]

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Why Apple Should Follow Michelin

January 22, 2012 – 8:15 pm

TweetWhat’s the use of offering more than 500,000 wares if customers can’t find their way through the gigantic bazaar? I know, I already harped on about the lack of curation in Apple’s App Store, but that was 16 months ago…when the Store contained a “mere” 250,000 apps. Since then, the iPhone has sold in ever [...]

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Will Microsoft buy RIM or Nokia?

January 15, 2012 – 8:15 pm

TweetWe continue along the lines of last week’s Monday Note kriegsspiel with the latest speculation Will Microsoft, at long last, buy RIM? The idea has been kicked around for at least five years: Days after the iPhone’s introduction in January 2007, Seeking Alpha suggested that the Xbox maker ought to buy RIM in order to [...]

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Samsung vs. Google

January 8, 2012 – 11:04 pm

TweetAndroid is a huge success. Google bought Andy Rubin’s company in 2005 and turned it into a smartphone operating system giant, with more than 50% of the global market and 700,000 activations a day this past December. Perhaps, as Steve Jobs seemed to think, it was Eric Schmidt’s position on Apple’s Board of Directors that [...]

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2011: Shift Happens

December 18, 2011 – 10:59 pm

TweetWhatever 2011 was, it wasn’t The Year Of The Incumbent. The high-tech world has never seen the ground shift under so many established companies. This causes afflicted CEOs to exhibit the usual symptoms of disorientation: reorg spams, mindless muttering of old mantras and, in more severe cases, speaking in tongues, using secret language known only [...]

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HP Kicks webOS To The Kerb

December 11, 2011 – 10:25 pm

TweetWe strongly believe that the best days for webOS are still ahead. Thus spake Meg Whitman in her memo to the troops, an intramural rendition of HP’s official announcement that webOS will be “contributed” to the Open Source community. …the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected [...]

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Behind RIM’s $485M Write-off

December 5, 2011 – 5:54 am

TweetOn December 5th, three days ago, RIM announced a $485M write-off “related to its inventory valuation of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets”. Wall Street didn’t like the news and dumped the stock, it went down 9.7% in one session. One of the last analysts supporting RIM, Scotia Capital’s Gus Papageorgiou, finally gave up and turned vocally bearish. [...]

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A Facebook Smartphone – Why?

November 27, 2011 – 10:53 pm

TweetAt the end of last week’s Monday Note, I briefly wondered about the rumored Amazon smartphone. Would it follow the Kindle Fire strategy: Pick Android’s lock and sell the device at or below cost in order to lubricate the wheels of Amazon’s e-commerce of tangible and intangible things? This week, we have the rebirth of [...]

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The Apple Wireless Carrier (Part 2)

November 20, 2011 – 8:40 pm

TweetSpurred by years of frustration with AT&T, Verizon, Orange and the like, I wrote a half-serious Monday Note a few months ago (Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier!) that imagined an Apple wireless universe. Simple pricing, no-surprise phone bills, no-tricks agreements. There would be dancing in the streets… Unfortunately (I concluded), if Apple were to [...]

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iTV: Where’s The Money?

November 13, 2011 – 5:58 pm

TweetIn reaction to last week’s technical speculation on the putative iTV, several commenters raised questions about content providers, distributors, and “pipes”. Does iTV help or harm NBC, Netflix, and Comcast? How does the [one last time: “putative”] iTV make money, and for whom? Indeed, the column ignored an important – perhaps the most important — [...]

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