November 11, 2012 – 6:46 pm
Tweet As I’ve written many times in the past, I’m part of the vast chorus that praises the Apple Store. And not just for the uncluttered product displays, the no-pressure sales people (who aren’t on commission), or the Genius Bar that provides expert help, but for the impressive architecture. Apple beautifies existing venues (Regent Street [...]
August 26, 2012 – 10:07 pm
TweetOnce upon a time, Steve Ballmer blasted Apple for asking its customers to pay $500 for an Apple logo. This was the “Apple Tax“, the price difference between the solid, professional workmanship of a laptop running on Windows, and Apple’s needlessly elegant MacBooks. Following last week’s verdict against Samsung, the kommentariat have raised the specter [...]
TweetNo Monday Note last week: I was in The Country of Sin, enjoying pleasures such as TGV trips across a landscape of old villages, Romanesque churches, Rhône vineyards — and a couple of nuclear power plants. All this without our friendly TSA. Back in the Valley, Apple just released their latest quarterly numbers. They weren’t [...]
TweetFacebook’s bumpy IPO debut could signal the end of a collective hallucination. Most of it pertains to the company’s ability to deliver an effective advertising machine. Pre-IPO numbers looked nice, especially when compared to Google at this critical stage of their respective business lives: Based on such numbers, and on the prospect for a billion [...]
TweetThere are many religions when it comes to calculating the “right” price for the shares of a publicly traded company. At a basic level, buying a share is an act of faith in the company’s future earnings. The strength of this belief manifests itself in the company’s P/E (Price/Earnings) ratio. The stronger the faith, the [...]
TweetI think I found a cure for both. First, the symptoms. Financially, California is close to being bankrupt, it spends more than it makes and runs a huge $361B debt, as illustrated by the online, live Debt Clock: Unemployment is high; infrastructure is neglected; the pride of California, its UC Colleges, must raise tuition beyond [...]
April 15, 2012 – 11:16 pm
TweetFacebook’s acquisition of Instagram — for one billion dollars — tells a lot about Mark Zuckerberg’s state of mind. Which is at least as interesting as other business considerations and was best captured by cartoonist Ingram Pinn in last week’s Financial Times comic. To illustrate John Gapper’s excellent Facebook is scared of the Internet column, [...]
April 15, 2012 – 11:16 pm
TweetThe best thing that happened to Apple in the last two decades was Steve Jobs’ 1997 return to power after he reversed-acquired the company he’d co-founded 20 years before. And the best thing that has happened in the Apple 2.0 era is iTunes. Without iTunes’ innovative micropayment system and its new way of selling songs [...]
TweetWould you buy Facebook shares? A few weeks ahead of its mammoth IPO, millions of people probably dream of getting a slice of it. Spreadsheet jockeys have done their job and demonstrated with unanimous conclusiveness that, indeed, Facebook deserves its expected $100 billion valuation — or that gravity’s law will inevitably apply. Facebook numbers are [...]
TweetThis week’s most stunning statistic: In February, Facebook drove more traffic to the Guardian web site than Google did. This fact was proffered (I couldn’t bring myself to write shared) at the Changing Medias Summit Conference by Tanya Corduroy, Guardian’s director for digital development (full text of her speech): Eighteen months ago, search represented 40% [...]
