August 19, 2012 – 10:58 pm
TweetOn August 15th, The Wall Street Journal published yet another story about Apple’s imminent invasion of the TV business. According to people who are “familiar with the matter”, the Cupertino company is… …in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators about letting consumers use an Apple device as a set-top box for live [...]
August 12, 2012 – 8:54 pm
TweetThe idea for today’s off-topic note came to me when I read “Microsoft’s Lost Decade“, an aptly titled Vanity Fair story. In the piece, Kurt Eichenwald tracks Microsoft’s decline as he revisits a decade of technical missteps and bad business decisions. Predictably, the piece has generated strong retorts from Microsoft’s Ministry of Truth and from [...]
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 [...]
TweetOr another killer product? Or, on the pessimistic side, a loser defensive move showing Apple’s fear of competitors such as Amazon, with its Kindle Fire, and Google’s 7″ Nexus tablet? Recent leaks from purported sources inside Apple’s traditional suppliers have ignited a new frenzy of speculation. And not just from the usual blogging suspects — [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
