TweetLast week was the 10th anniversary of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital Conference, D10 for short. For the past three years it’s been held at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, South of Los Angeles. If I leave in the wee hours and take an North and East detour around the Evil [...]
TweetFascinating doesn’t do justice to the spectacle, nor to the stakes. Taken in pairs, these giants exchange fluids – products and billion$ – while fiercely fighting with their other half. Each company is the World’s Number One in their domain: Intel in microprocessors, Samsung in electronics, Apple in failure to fail as ordained by the [...]
TweetThere was a time when clever individuals could sustain themselves by exploiting people’s ignorance and anxiety. Augurs studied the flight of birds to explain the will of the gods; haruspices practiced divination by inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals. For fear of bursting into uncontrollable laughter, so the joke goes, the fortune tellers studiously avoided [...]
TweetIn the weeks preceding the April 24th release of Apple’s quarterly earnings, a number of old canards sent the stock down by about 12%: Carriers are going to kill the iPhone Golden Goose by cutting back “exorbitant” subsidies; iPhone sales are down from the previous quarter in the US; inexorable commoditization will soon bring down [...]
TweetThe end of iPhone/iPad One Size Fits All, that is. So far, Apple has managed to sell more than 300M iOS devices using only a single size for the iPhone and another for the iPad. I’m becoming convinced this can’t last much longer. Soon, I believe, we’ll see a range of physically distinct iPhone and [...]
TweetMuch has been written about RIM’s gloomy quarterly numbers, most of it sensible (with one brain flatulence exception). The attention is a testament—an apt word—to the place RIM once occupied. From its humble pager origins, the BlackBerry, rightly nicknamed CrackBerry, became the de rigueur device of enterprise users. Like most former BlackBerry fans, I have [...]
TweetThe treatment for the blood disease called Polycythemia Vera (the name means “too many red cells”) goes back to the Dark Ages: Lance a vein and relieve the patient of a pint of blood. Phlebotomy treats the symptom but not the condition. There is no known cure; the blood-letting must be repeated indefinitely. This is [...]
March 19, 2012 – 12:09 am
TweetIn an August, 2010 Monday Note titled Smartcameras In Our Future?, I wished for smartphone-like apps running on a nice compact camera such as Canon’s S90 (now replaced by the S100). At the time, in-camera photo processing was limited and wireless connectivity required accessories like Eye-Fi, a clever but not so easy-to-use SD card with [...]
TweetIt’s the rumor that refuses to die and the myth that keeps on giving…pageviews. Serial Apple-rumorist Gene Munster is at it again: In a 15 minute Bloomberg Radio program (obligingly summarized here by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget and here by 9to5Mac) the PiperJaffray analyst issues his umpteenth version of the prediction: Apple’s TV is real. [...]
February 26, 2012 – 10:39 pm
TweetWhy is HP still in the PC business? It must be for the sport, because the money isn’t there. Looking at the quarterly figures released this past week, we see PC revenue down 15% year-to-year, with a low 5.2% Operating Profit: HP can explain. In the earnings release conference call (transcript obligingly provided by Seeking [...]
