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re good or bad news
I think tepid response to RIMM products is bad for the smartphone segment, but may indicate interest in at least seeing upcoming competitive Apple products before making their next purchase. The after-hours price plummet in AAPL suggests folks fear the effect isn't going to be limited to RIMM.
Given what Apple is doing in CPUs, is there reason to hope Apple can also make crazy growth in smartphones? Let's consider briefly that Apple will be rolling out new hardware, new software, new carrier deals, and lots of new geographies in the upcoming quarter. I'm thinking that, whatever happens to the smartphone market, Apple will have a respectable-looking quarter in its phone business. The possibility of a crazy blowout exists, but if the whole segment is in the toilet, that's not where the betting would lay.
Mind if I ask, how much RIMM revenue is service subscriptions (the push servers and so on) and how much is hardware?
Take care,
--Tex.
re stores
Did I mention here that the Houston Galleria store, which was a small-format store, closed briefly and re-opened a bit larger?
It's deeper, and salesfolks save space by handling sales with handheld computers instead of requiring folks to queue at a register.
Take care,
--Tex.
store rollouts
The way the stores keep rolling out, I'm thinking the day will soon come that the number of Americans that aren't regularly pretty close to an Apple Store will become small enough that the principal place to grow stores is in foreign countries. I'm not sure how soon "soon" is, as I'm not any kind of authority on domestic marketing data.
I do think that the increases in the UK portend well, and suggest that once Apple's got some specimen stores up and running in a country that Apple is pretty good at being able to use those to train personnel to man subsequent expansion. I'm particularly keen on Chinese growth, and I'd be interested to hear about India, South America, and Russia. These are places I think have both a growing class of folks able to afford the machines (India and Russia perhaps better than South America), and establishment as a serious, solid player has to be a good thing.
As Apple further internationalizes, the strength of Cocoa's localization scheme should make investments in Apple's platform increasingly valuable.
Take care,
--Tex.
re sales and eps
I certainly find big deals encouraging, and I think the CDS-identified AoHong acquisition certainly will perform. However, CAAH's fundraising last year was predicated on the idea that it would be acquiring two targets, and I think both the target earnings and the target share price information are based on the idea of having two executing earners in China. Also, CAAH owns less than 60% of AoHong, so not all AoHong's revenues flow to CAAH.
I think CAAH will end up with a new subsidiary eventually, and I think AoHong-created profit will help fund it. I think until then, CAAH might do okay but I don't see it exploding. Moreover, at current share volumes, we really need something quite a bit more exciting to get folks watching this stock -- you just can't buy/sell a position with a daily volume under $20k shares, with a share price under $0.10. We've had a lot of days that $10k doesn't change hands.
To be able to make money on this, there needs to be some excitement. CDS is trying to parade CAAH in investor conferences, but I think the best way to fix the share price and the volume has got to be solid news on serious growth and profit -- which is likelier to happen if we've got a second operating unit in China.
The next question is how long it'll take people to care about revenues in China. A look at ETLT suggests folks can happily underprice it for more than a couple of quarters. That sucker, despite being profitable, has traded below cash equivalents!
Take care,
--Tex.
AAPL to shrink app footprints in Snow Leopard ...
... by removing unnecessary files it's needlessly been spraying into your hard drive for years?
http://www.pipian.com/hacking/explaining_snow_leopard_app_sizes.html
I liked the story about the slick new compiler and the use of more shared libraries quite a bit better, but this one has the advantage of being much more plausibly true.
*sigh*
Take care,
--Tex.
re RIMM
This image is from a page already linked here and described and discussed.
But, thanks for the bottom-confirmation!
Take care,
--Tex.
re Apple Stores
The Apple Stores in/near Houston seem to be hard to reach, at least for me. The nearest is in the Galleria, which, to paraphrase Yogi Barra, is so crowded that nobody goes there any more.
Not sure where they should put it, given the various characteristics that make getting anywhere in Houston a chore, but ... ugh.
Take care,
--Tex.
re 60-day double
I wish. People can stay crazy longer than you can stay liquid!
The biggest craziness I've seen lately is ACAS, which is totally underpriced. The news lately has been hammering it with all kind of excuses. One defense of the stock, couched as a criticism of infotainment pretending to be investment news, is here:
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/06/professional-stock-analyst-opinions.html
I'm still long, but I'm honestly getting disgusted with unfollowed, illiquid companies that don't have a dividend to reward folks who are unlucky enough to get stuck holding. I've got a few investments like this, all with business in China, and I think I've had about as much fun as I can take.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Mercedes iPhone cradle
Here's hoping the in-dash nav is worthwhile. I find it curious that the phone sits in a drink holder where it's likely in some models of car to get someone's spilled drink on it (the Mercedes holders will do OK with a 12-oz can, but don't try one of those call cups with a 12-oz-size skinny bottom, or *boom*). The existing iPod integration kit affixes to the interior door of the glove box, where there's less distance to route cables to the in-dash command system.
Incidentally, on the licensing front:
according to an Engadget commenter, that bit of the license is lifted almost word for word from the Goodle Maps API license. so, according to them, TomTom or whoever could use their own maps for turn-by-turn voice directions with no problems. i'm sure someone will explain it.
MSFT has some "not for lifesaving devices" language in some of its EULAs, which when asked it blamed on Sun's insistence because of bundled Java. If Google isn't promising uptime and requires all users to accept risk of failure, Apple would kinda be stuck passing this along. Third parties that sell apps with their own databases, and don't need Google's service to pull off their location or direction tricks, will be able I imagine to get along just fine -- assuming Apple will write these guys a manuscript license that addresses the specifics involved.
What I want to see is a touch-screen UI in the Mercedes dash, controlled by, communicating with, the phone. The UI in the existing command system is pretty awful. Text entry while you're driving is really not for the feint of heart.
Take care,
--Tex.
Garmin phone as Zune pinup girl
I didn't realize the Garmin phone would suck, and if that's true, then the market for folks who want to walk around with both a GPS and a phone should have some pressure toward just getting the iPhone, right? Google's data seems ever-improving, and has great detail most places I've looked, and doesn't need a city-specific plug-in (Maybe the boat navigation plug-ins they sold my sister aren't representative of Garmin's usual product expansion; what do I know?).
For driving around town, I've seen Garmin and other units and I can't believe a good front-end on a Google-data set won't fully replace what I've seen. Maybe you could share with me the Garmin features I'm overlooking? I'm not expert with them, by any stretch, but I *have* used them.
For recreation and outdoor use, I don't think Google has bothered to get charts of water depth or the like for boaters, and I have no idea whether Google has topographical data up its sleeve (US Geological survey stuff is available, isn't it?) for helping folks chart paths through the wilderness, and I'm fully ready to believe that Garmin units have or can take cards for all this stuff.
The thing I like about Google is that I've seen it go from useless outlines of continents to detailed street-by-street maps supporting point-to-point directions (I was looking for underwater hockey clubs in Australia a few years back) within just a few years, and it was a free update. The inherent obsolescence of onboard data sets bugs me.
Other than selling units and expansion cards for units, how do TomTom and Garmin make their $? Is iPhone really a potential opportunity for these GPS handset makers, and not just a threat?
As for the crippling clause in Apple's SDK ... I have to wonder whether this is like Sun stating Java isn't for lifesaving equipment or the like: the work of liability-crazed attorneys gone wild. If, in fact, Apple wants to prevent folks from writing a mapping UI ... ugh. When the app is in the foreground, one would think Apple's concern about demanding data from the GPS module should be pretty slight. When it's closed, the overhead is gone. Does Apple think the mapping revenue is so good that Apple won't risk losing the revenue to a 3rd party developer?
Any idea what Apple's thinking there?
True, Apple might lock out TomTom in order to stay chummy with Google. Then again, that seems like a particularly stupid thing to do at this point in time, where Apple has completely locked down its phone platform, and where all sorts of people are looking at how Apple chooses to use its monopoly position on the platform.
I suspect Apple simply doesn't want to discover folks tried to position its handhelds as mission-critical failsafe lifesaving devices capable of supporting liability suits priced in the tens of millions, and wants to make sure that "real time" and "accurate positioning" and so on don't get twisted into some level of precision it can't expect to reliably occur. Would Apple really bar a mapping or dispatching app, given the likelihood that businesses would want these very features for managing fleets and so on? After all, the already-demonstrated salesforce app seemed to be heading in this direction with intelligent discovery of nearby potential sales calls, and so on. Would Apple ban including this kind of feature? Of course, Apple's done boneheaded things before, and I could be watching it again now ....
Incidentally, Apple's apparent take against background apps and polling and so on seems to indicate the iPhone won't be a good way to track where your people are, because the phones won't be running apps that will routinely phone in positions in the background. If you want to track a driver, I think you still need a transmitter in his cab. However, pushing dispatch notifications should not be a problem, especially for a phone that's docked to a vehicle's interface and has plenty of power. Hmm.
This looks like something in which Apple will need to get some expertise before it can be expected to understand what it needs to do to support what folks want to do with the phone. As with 3rd party apps themselves, Apple will be dragged kicking and screaming toward where the demand is, rather than intelligently leading the charge. However, with the profit potential being where it is, Apple can find a solution (e.g., purveyors of safety applications may need to demonstrate both adequate liability insurance and a EULA exhaustingly exonerating Apple from issues arising from expecting the iPhone to perform flawlessly in the real world where things fail.)
This raises an interesting issue: will Apple forego applications involving safety, navigation, aeronautics, etc. just because it doesn't want to conduct a bunch of torture-testing on its hardware? Is this a big enough (financially) market to chase? Would Google offer data on airports, air-traffic control frequencies, protected airspace, etc. so folks could build tools for pilots atop its services? Again, I think the tendency of computers not to have been through the kind of reliability testing typically required of approved aircraft safety devices spells doom for most devices in this space. But ... how hard is it really? And is the money good enough? Is it "too niche" for Apple to chase? (rofl)
Take care,
--Tex.
iPhone v GPS
With Apple's UI and Google's data, who should we expect to beat the iPhone as a handheld map/directions tool?
But more seriously: with Apple able to build in volume, what's the long-term prognosis for anyone else selling either handheld mapping tools or GPS-phones? The iPod, especially after it became a $399-and-cheaper device, certainly put a cramp in the power of competitors to sell competing audio players, and it's not like Sony and the like were without resources to compete.
>40% considering iPhone? Before the new price was announced?
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/06/19/42.percent.want.iphone/
Garmin's phone costlier per unit than iPhone?
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/01/garmin.nuvifone.price.leak/
The articles I'm seeing about Apple's ability to use component deals to support hypercompetitive retail pricing in handhelds (remember, the iPod that was cheaper than the retail price of the hard drive it contained?) suggest interesting things for how Apple will play this market -- and I think the App Store and SaaS will help Apple to make more of the installed base as Apple increasingly competes on price at the handset level.
Wild, eh? Anyone have thoughts on how Garmin and the like will compete? Assuming Apple's phones become more popular than its iPods, who else would auto manufacturers want to be compatible with? Might Apple have a chance at ad-based revenue from maps/search from autos, such that it'd make the auto interface as cheap as possible?
Crazy stuff.
Take care,
--Tex.
intact it may be worth more
but split it may be easier to argue for the value of the parts
My bigger concern is that without liquidity, it won't matter what the value assigned to the shares is, and to get liquidity we probably need the businesses together.
The idea of ETLT on the amex is interesting, I didn't think that was plausible, but if it is then all the better: being on a real exchange will certainly improve the opportunity to enter and leave positions, and will improve the profile of the stock. At the moment, I don't think anyone follows this one.
Also, as you say, folks doubt the reported financials. It might help to have detail by division, so folks know what the different parts of the company are doing, so they understand the business is legit.
Take care,
--Tex.
re get an iPod
The promotion won't help Apple make money off iPods, but it's priced just to cover the iPod Touch, so I expect accelerometer-based game revenue to be improved, and with the growing user base I expect more and more value to accrue to the whole platform.
I think it's a net good thing.
And of course it helps sell Macs ....
Take care,
--Tex.
New iTS data point
Having hit the five billion song mark, Apple also apparently is doing 50K movies a day between sales and rentals. Considering the relatively small size of the market for aTVs and the fact Apple hasn't really got a living-room-killer yet (though, that cloud data storage and push initiative and the ownership of a big data center might suggest something as Apple discovers the joy of pushing content to clients), I think 50K/day isn't too bad for movies.
Hasn't Apple still got a kinda small movie catalog?
This quarter will suck on iPhone numbers (they ran out on purpose), but the following quarter is one I expect to set records (3G phone launch in multiple countries, plus back-to-school). My big question is whether iPods and Macs will salvage the current quarter. The fact Apple's amortizing past iPhone sales across this quarter will be interesting -- it'll make Apple's quarter for iPhone revenues look at least as good as the prior quarter, though the cash flow won't flow in from phone sales, as it's already got the cash, just hasn't declared it to be revenue yet.
Wild.
Take care,
--Tex.
OT re heliobacter
I think he kinda had to use his own gut: the ethics involved in deliberately exposing someone to an organism you think will cause ulcers when it's not established they will readily be cured later would he a serious problem with oversight bodies.
Take care,
--Tex.
re "me" icon
I think Apple's trying to push folks gently toward the idea they should like and trust cloud computing. I think the idea of the cloud was a design requirement in the icon, and that this is what they got left with. Without the cloud, it'd be easy to assume MobileMe was some kind of device-to-device synch tech, rather than a synch tool that was driven by the cloud and accessible from anywhere.
Also: it's for consumption by MSFT's customers and not necessarily the Mac faithful. Apple's pushing to get businesses which want something like Exchange to try it without the Exchange license or the dedicated hardware, and I think Apple will over time be pushing to offer more and more services and software designed to pull folks off competing platforms more gently than the "dude, your pc is so uncool" line that might work with college kids but hasn't flown particularly well in businesses.
Just a thought.
Take care,
--Tex.
OT heliobacter
Ohh, boy. When the rediscoverer gains more fame than the original, what fun. The thing I think we can credit the Aussie is the causative connection between H. pylori and stomach ulcers, which he demonstrated by causing ulcers and curing them by manipulating whether the heliobacter were present. He caught a lot of flak for that until his work was replicated.
Take care,
--Tex.
re shipping costs
I'm very interested in the changes in shipping costs. Can you give me a source to track this info?
Thanks!
Take care,
--Tex.
OT re German quacks
Heliobacter research was originally Australian.
But yeah: the "facts" that "everyone knows" can certainly change with time. I mean, a few decades ago everyone knew the planet was headed for a global freeze-in, right?
I haven't studied abiotic oil. I would be curious where the carbon is thought to come from that ends up in the hydrocarbons we're pumping. On the other hand, I really doubt it's all made out of dead dinosaurs!
Take care,
--Tex.
OT viable alternatives
The distinction here is that in the U.S. at least, there *is* not viable (key word being *viable*) alternative at the moment
Actually, I think the point some were making here before is that there are alternatives, and as fuel prices increase they become more and more viable.
As for the unlikeliness of prices tripling ... the chart you link shows halving and doubling of the inflation-adjusted values repeatedly over the decades, and the fact that China is industrializing and Venezuela can't pump what it used to and all the producers are consuming more of their own product and so forth really seems to make sense in terms of elevating competition for those last few barrels sold every day. China, India, South America, the Middle East ... all these areas are rich in population and are improving their quality of like -- and with it, their demand for energy. This is going to get a lot costlier before it gets better.
But there's a ceiling on how bad it's likely to get. When South Africa was embargoed, it did what the Germany did when supply lines to oil were unreliable: it made fuels from some other carbon source. When it's clear fuels are just too darned expensive, we'll see folks investing in ways not to need fuel. At present, it's a niche. I hope to see this thinking go mainstream in my lifetime. There is alternative to petroleum-based fuels (Diesel engines were originally run on peanut oil), and for many application there are alternatives to burning carbon-based fuels at all. With increasing price of the current leader, the attractiveness of alternatives will just grow and grow until the dam breaks.
According to the graph, the inflation-adjusted price of oil is something like it was in '80-'81, but I notice we're not queuing up for gasoline now and taking turns fueling cars based on the license plate numbers being even or odd. The last time we faced this price, it was at a time of deliberate production constraint. This time, we have some production issues (efficiency in countries with internal confusion like Venezuela, or civil war like Nigeria or Iraq) but the demand growth has really caught up with supply to the point there's a legitimate rather than an artificial scarcity.
The good news on the serious scarcity is that producers can't tailor oil prices under these conditions to ensure alternatives don't become attractive. Under these conditions, we should expect real alternatives to be sought and invested in: nobody thinks the bottom will drop out of the oil prices over a positive trade deal because the price is real.
Interesting, no? The crazy oil prices may finally wake us to better alternatives. And not a moment too soon!
Take care,
--Tex.
$550/ea
The $550/ea assumption has some elucidation here:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/18/morgan_stanley_compares_apple_to_nintendo_while_raising_estimates.html
It depends on the idea that iPhone customers will also buy other services: that Apple will benefit from an 8.5% attach rate on MobileMe at $99, and will make a single App Store sale to one half of iPhone buyers. In other words, it's not $550 per phone, it's an average of $550 per iPhone customer, with some of the revenue being possibly recurring.
For my part, I will want to hear reviews of MobileMe before parting with money over it.
Assuming Apple's new mobile devices are really the slick game platform that they appear to be, I am interested to know (a) when network-enabled multiplayer games will show, and (b) how large the buying-it-because-of-its-games market might turn out to be. iPhone Touch might be a great game platform, with WiFi networking and an opportunity for stereo surround.
Just for fun, and because this week's been rough on me, I note this paragraph:
Huberty's more bullish scenario assumes Apple shares will trade at a 30 times multiple to calendar year 2009 earnings, helped by a Mac share that edges higher to 4.5 percent and the company's slice of the global smartphone market hits 14 percent. In this scenario, which would have shares trading at $278, related services and software sales penetration from MobileMe and the App Store would grow 37 percent, "with roughly twice the base case 2009 operating margin expansion."
From her lips to God's ear
Take care,
--Tex.
OT oil from Iraq
Last I heard, the folks who don't like the idea of secular democracy functioning in the Middle East have been targeting petroleum pipelines and terminals to prevent government revenues, and/or stealing output to fund their own activities. It's a pity the locals can't benefit from their natural wealth due to political movements that want primarily to enslave them (well, a nominally-theocratic autocracy might be described as doing something other than enslaving its subjects, but I'm not sure that changing the words changes the facts, a rose smelling most of the time like a rose).
If transport costs went through the roof, we'd have some serious reason to build more locally, though it would definitely excite folks who were happy to see environmentally-risky high-tech production fly south for the winter (or east).
Take care,
--Tex.
re accounting
The next question is whether Apple, under the veil of need to keep updating the handsets' software free for two years, will still amortize iPhone revenues over 24 months. I expect this question to be answered in the next quarterly conference call.
The idea Apple gets its filthy lucre up front is certainly appealing to me when I consider Apple's cash flow ... but when I consider how lame Apple's been in turning its cash pile into revenue, I get blue again. Still, Apple's likely sales of App Store products should be another good way to boost revenues. The Spanish game developer's comment that Apple offers the only way to get worldwide access to the exact customers you target with a particular software release is an interesting point. I'll be interested in hearing developer comments on their experience with the App Store relative to other sales avenues they've known before.
Take care,
--Tex.
On Apple's iPhone price
Another analyst thinks that carriers will absorb a subsidy under $270, for a total iPhone price from Apple of under $470, but imagines that with two App Store apps per user, Apple should get hundreds of millions in revenue atop the handset and subsidy payments.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/06/10/piper.long.view.of.iphone/
I notices several announced apps with prices of "free", whose authors apparently expected to get ad-based or other user-activity-generated revenue. I'm guessing Apple hasn't tapped that yet.
Take care,
--Tex.
OT jacking up the price
Some stores use their fuel prices to get folks into the store, where the real margin is captured. These folks have an incentive to price fuel with thin margins to look competitive. The commodity nature of gasoline and Diesel offer a powerful barrier to some firm deciding to raise prices: someone else will take all the sales simply by charging a competitive price.
The crack spread is, as I understand it, getting thinner: that is, the difference in price between the stuff going into a refinery and the stuff that comes out of the refinery is getting slimmer. The profit isn't being captured by refiners, or gasoline stations, but by old-timers with cheap-producing wells. The newer wells created in multibillion-dollar offshore deepwater exploration and development projects have a much higher cost per barrel, which is why they were never drilled when oil was $30/barrel.
The high price of oil on the world market -- the raw input to making gasoline from petroleum products pumped from the ground -- is a key culprit, and its price is driven largely by increases in consumption: oil producing states are industrializing (they're doing things besides hiring foreigners to come pump oil, and so are consuming more locally), so oil-producing states have less to sell (well, in Venezuela's case, they fired their competent operators over suspected political affiliations, and the new guys can't keep the stuff running as efficiently, plus local fuel prices are so low locals drive big honking SUVs because the fuel is nearly free, so exports from that country are taking a dive); and consumer populations in the US, China, and the developing world are all growing and doing more work that (presently) requires fuels.
Eventually the price of fuels will get to the point that alternatives are really a bargain, and we'll be using biohexanol or wave-action power or what have you. I just don't know at what price the competing tech will really take off. I have seen articles on energy-neutral housing, and how folks have designed houses that consume no more power than they produce, enabling the owners to live off an electrical supply. Nice.
The "evil plot" to raise fuel prices used to be the cartel of oil producing nations, but I think it's clear they really lack pricing power at this point, and are simply commodity suppliers in the happy position of supplying a low-cost commodity that is in ridiculously-expensive high demand.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Snow Leopard or Cloud Leopard?
With Apple apparently getting into the business of cloud computing, Apple's interest in high-performance, low-maintenance, energy-efficient computational solutions for datacenters seems to have become a bit more acute. I expect Apple's server products over the next couple of years to benefit from this.
re caps and the RDF
I recall Jobs giving speed not in Mb/s but in seconds to download specific specimens -- a bake-off. The bake-off contest probably should give one an idea how it was cooked up. The comparisons to the other carriers' phones are potentially complicated with things like Javascript interpreter speeds and things having little to do with download speeds.
I suppose the next question is what other carriers will do with download rate throttling. I expect blogs and ezines to answer this one promptly after July 11.
In other news, Apple's effort to get folks coding to take advantage of unused cycles in GPUs and make better use of unused CPU cores may turn out in hindsight to be like its adoption of USB, and really change what's available for consumers -- a standards body including the competing graphics card makers is set to consider standards for coding across multiple hardware types:
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/06/17/opencl.standard/
Considering what Apple is trying to do with its hardware, Apple benefits if game coders and others who don't develop first for Apple products get onboard with standards that can be ported, rather than build monolithic unthreaded garbage and then try to port it to a system that expects performance through SMT. It'll be interesting to see what turns up on this front. Will GPU makers' drivers expose in-effect system calls? Will some runtime layer end up deciding what hardware will get what instructions on the fly? I'm interested to see how this will work, though in theory it could be very effective -- the devil is in the details ....
Take care,
--Tex.
dotSuck, or evidence of advances?
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/06/17/mac.service.down/
The question is whether Apple's slipping worse than normal, or whether Apple is just letting service on dotMac go to hell while working on certain steps in the MobileMe transition. In either case, it doesn't look like Apple is taking care of its $99/y customers, especially those who are building needed solutions around iDisk, Backup, or the persistent, ISP-unconnected email address.
Bleh.
Take care,
--Tex.
re WiFi speeds?
I've seen "broadband" in the US not actually passing 1.5Mb/s, so maybe the fact a wireless LAN can move at 54Mb/s isn't really the point if connection to the rest of the world is under 2. Anyone know what speeds actually pass for broadband these days?
Incidentally, the article you link has an update stating the 1.4Mb/s is an observed speed, not necessarily a cap. Regional variation?
In any event, my impression of EDGE was that its download speed was akin to dial-up, so >1Mb/s will be a big advance in my view. And then there's the GPS and so on.
With the GPS, I think Apple will obsolete the in-dash nav system in my car, whose maps -- which were embarrassingly out of date the day it was delivered to me new -- are in dire need of replacement by a Google-powered ever-updating solution. I hope Apple has a strategy for synching with, or controlling, or serving, to these in-dash systems down the road. The system in my car has buttons to push for music, telephone, maps, directions ... so much of what the system does will be done better by the 3GPhone that I find myself hoping Apple licenses multitouch displays for in-dash systems that support iPhone linkage.
I imagine an app that acts as an iPhone server, making the iPhone available to serve content to supporting devices, which might find the phone via Bonjour ....
Ahh, well.
Take care,
--Tex.
re profit
I think the outlook for profit this year is more than merely plausible, but the company won't be producing per-share what I'd like to see until either we have some kind of big surprise in business development or CAAH replaces BigTree with some other Chinese acquisition (given that BigTree died on the vine, as it were).
In the meantime, CAAH's holding CDS may be a good thing ....
Take care,
--Tex.
SproutCore: MSFT's nightmare?
Back in the days of the MSFT/Netscape conflict, a major reason MSFT wanted to stifle Netscape distribution and development was to ensure no alternative to Win32 would become widely available, or MSFT would lose the power to force people to buy its operating system because they'd not need the APIs with which it was bundled. The idea of shipping native-app-feeling tools using standard browser APIs reinvigorates this idea, just as MSFT's loss of browser share has become pretty clearly established as a long-term trend and the public has become comfortable with at least occasional use of non-MSFT browsers (of which Mozilla derivatives are the clear numerical leaders).
The fact Apple can offer the UI it offers in a browser using standards-conforming code using APIs everybody can get for free seems to mean the nails and hammer are out for vendors of second-rate APIs (multithreading support? runtime hardware optimization updates?) for desktop applications. Stuff like this will be a boost for freeware platforms, for sure. Next, it'll be a mainstream mechanism for delivering whole apps that don't run in browsers. You remember Java, right?
Interesting.
Thanks for the link!
Take care,
--Tex.
background processes on iPhone
Just watching the WWDC. They have a non-background solution for notification of messages from closed apps (you are outbid; you have an IM; etc.). Apple will launch in September a push notification server mechanism (apparently, MobileMe) to allow audio, graphical, or text notifications related to installed apps. Low-overhead, scalable solution that doesn't require polling.
It looks like Apple might be offering Keynote and PowerPoint play from iPhone, but I'm not sure how far the document support goes.
Interesting stuff.
Take care,
--Tex.
beyond Macs
This link was interesting for one reason:
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/06/06/lack-of-mac-branding-raises-questions/
I think it suggests Apple is really pushing to get its tools and services in use beyond the traditional Mac install base. Apple wants to use its licensed Exchange protocols to enable folks to avoid having to buy Exchange at all? To offer an Apple SaaS replacement?
Interesting ...
Take care,
--Tex.
Buying $50
Who in the world buys 50.00 worth of stock at a time?
Folks who put in $50 speculatively and want out, for one. Or a buyer may have wanted thousands at that price, but the brokers may have offered smaller lots and may have been trading the order split over several days due to lack of volume. The low volume in this stock has basically made it illiquid for me; I can't exit, and if I tried to build an addition to my position I'm afraid I'd just run up the price trying.
What this stock needs is news. The failure of the Chinese toy subsidiary to get its books in usable order torpedoed what might have been a nice growth driver for the company, and it'll be interesting to see whether CAAH finds an alternate acquisition target.
Take care,
--Tex.
re MobileMe v Google
But Google's highest interest is going to be in making its own web-apps reign supreme on its own platform, and to use its platform to advance and give primacy to Google search and its own revenue streams. Apple's interest is diametrically opposed with respect to web-apps, particularly now that we've seen it jump in the deep end with MobileMe.
I see Apple offering MobileMe as an Exchange replacement (helping people access their own data), but I don't see Apple trying to offer the myriad diverse types of content Google makes money helping people access (data belonging largely to strangers, which you are only just now realizing you'd like to access). Thus -- and maybe I'm missing the boat here -- I view the companies' online offerings as orthogonal and complementary rather than opposing and competitive.
I think it's in Google's interest to make its web properties and their associated ads the most valuable source of data on any connected platform, and so Google will be pushing connected platforms capable of accessing Google's content ... but need not thwart anyone from providing another solution to getting online and accessing Google's content. I think Apple and Google will be making each other's products worth more for a while yet -- and sharing revenue while they're at it. I have a sneaking suspicion that the push to get Safari in broader use on MS-Win has been based in part on the desire to get more referral revenue from the Google search bar Apple sticks right next to the URL bar. (I think there's also an interest in battle-testing Cocoa-on-MS-Win, too, so Apple can offer paid software and services to more people, though I do not see Apple opening this development route to non-Apple developers.)
It's hard to imagine that at some point, Apple isn't going to wind up having deal with the "open" vs. "closed/proprietary" issue in the media
Apple's been barraged with it for years, no? And Apple's solution has been in part to use open standards (e.g., for networking protocols), and in part to use technologies designed to integrate with Apple products and strategies (e.g., FairPlay to ensure MSFT doesn't stranglehold the DRM market and take all the profit from content distribution as it was supposed to do back in the beginning of the millennium). I think an Apple move toward ODC or the like might be a signal Apple has a deep commitment to standards, but frankly I think Apple's strategy is simply pragmatic (e.g., offer DRM-free music at a price that allows Apple to test the demand for it, but not spend a lot of money getting labels to go that road when Apple's margins are thin enough already).
It seems to me Apple would do well to spend a little less time focusing on bathroom escorts, and a lot more time on communicating effectively with the iPhone developer community.
Yeah, that story did make Apple look silly ... but imagine the alternative: Apple invites a bunch of journalists to a place where Top Secret Stuff is going on, and just lets them run underfoot anywhere so that when they don't turn up where expected you have no idea where they've got to or what they're reading or whom they've found to comment on some topic that's outside the scope of Apple's orchestrated media event. Nah, I don't think I see that being allowed either, do you? I think the escort -- to the bathroom, or elsewhere -- is expected. The reason the guy was irritated is that it make him realize his repeated need to go to the bathroom was being noted, and he was embarrassed to have his health speculated on by Apple folks who were getting a little unintentional reporting of their own.
For better or worse, I think an ever larger chunk of the media, tech opinion leaders, and even general public, has a real distaste for the consequences of the desktop platform having going down that path with Microsoft
I think folks realize there are costs associated with lock-in and I think that realization is good. Apple has largely ditched some proprietary stuff (I don't think AppleTalk is running out-of-the-box, for example, just TCP/IP), has created standards out of others (QuickTime runs largely a bunch of standards-based formats like H.264, and Apple now even allows other folks to use their mark 'Firewire' to describe their IEEE-1394-compliant connector and cable implementations), and mostly retains proprietary code where it really adds benefit (e.g., the implementation of Cocoa -- the thing that makes the platform the development dream it's claimed to be). On the other hand, we have weirdo file formats for iWork, DRM that only runs on Apple products, and a few other cases that don't clearly fall into one of the neat categories I'd like to put them. I'm thinking that there's not really a document format standard yet, or that it doesn't yet support all the stuff Apple would do. Eventually I think we may see what Apple is doing with this stuff (heck, what it's even doing with iWork: is it intended eventually to be a broad-use office suite? will Apple launch it on MS-Win when it's got all the features in place to make this feasible?). For the time being, I don't see Apple as acting with any special evil in proprietariness -- though I must confess I roll my eyes when I see Apple trying to get developers to tie services to dotMac, which in my view is a turd. (The mail is slow, the backup didn't work reliably, it was the most expensive solution I'd seen in its class ...)
Let's hope Apple figures out how to increase reliability and utility of its online service as it launches MobileMe. If it's got a tool for prying data out of Exchange servers and pumping it back into something else, it might make a great migration tool for someone looking to defenestrate their network, even if they had no intention of actually using it long term. Depending how it's priced for business, it might make good sense though -- if it's reliable.
Take care,
--Tex.
Then there's 3 of us here :P em.
more foreign Stores
Apple's decision to launch multiple Beijing stores before seeing the results of the first store encourage me that Apple is aggressively growing its store count, which -- based on Apple's success in selling goods through the stores -- is a good sign for revenue growth, particularly in countries that haven't had much Apple sales previously. If Apple makes MobileMe a good multilingual service, Apple could slowly capture some valuable entrepreneurial business in countries that have valuable, booming entrepreneurial markets.
Looks good to me
Take care,
--Tex.
the bottom is in? em.
re selling
I think the recent offering by CDS brought in lots of the current investors, and more CDS offerings may have folks raising money for other offerings that are more exciting. Not that this one won't be a winner, but if there's a "better" winner on the horizon, and cash is tight ....
Who knows why any fool does the things he does?
Take care,
--Tex.
we can sing a duet em.