Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
mobile platform war: maybe a win-win?
Assuming Google isn't making a bundle on the Android platform in unit licensing, and that Google's revenue model will involve revenue sharing for services built on APIs that invoke Google-powered web properties, what does Google care whether folks access these propertles through an iPhone app or through an app built atop Android?
I think Google's push it to make traditional power-brokers in this space -- MSFT in the OS and the carriers for service -- irrelevant by pushing all the traffic to sites offering interchangeable parts, rather than to proprietary alternatives that would lock Google out of service revenue.
In a way, I think it's like Apple trying to protect its ability to sell hardware to customers by opening a music store that uses a DRM MSFT can't tax to death. Google, I imagine, is simply trying to protect its future -- though it's likely to do more than that, as one might measure MSFT's OS share in the mobile space going forward.
Do you really see Apple and Google as enemies in this space? Their revenues just don't seem to be coming out of the same dish. They aren't natural competitors, I don't think.
Am I missing something?
Take care,
--Tex.
re Apple's SOCs
I think this rocks. This plays to the very strengths Apple's runtime-linked and multiply-inherited environment offers in theory: folks can code to an API that offers lots of flexibility without having to worry about the hardware-specific quirks of various physical resources supporting the software, because strangers have created the hardware-specific optimizations that the libraries standing behind the API kick in automatically depending which GPU(s), processor(s), co-processors, etc. one has in one's machine. The fact that you can code to an "acceleration framework" and get SIMD to come out right for your code on either PPC or x86 was a start, and this new round of improvements will be useful for getting more oomph out of GPUs and maybe newer instructions on the new Intel chips.
Imagine not needing to recode every time some new whiz-bang new instruction set improvement offers to speed some operation, because your code inherits the optimization the next time Apple updates everyone's stock set of libraries your code will inherit at next runtime.
And what's this got to do with SOC? If Apple can build the hardware needed to push through the instructions it prefers, and can arrange for everyone's code to use the instructions that work best on its new hardware platforms by simply launching hardware-specific code when generalized APIs are called on the new platforms, Apple will be able to deliver pretty high performance code to users without making all the developers rethink their entire code base for a new platform. Apple can, in such an environment, make a custom SOC an asset rather than a liability. With zillions of units, owning more of the IP in each unit will mean keeping more of the profit to be had in each, and will help maintain margins -- or help underprice competitors, if Apple's profit turns out to come from things like software upgrade revenue sharing on a platform that becomes significant.
As for ZFS: I'm not sure whether ZFS has some issues that make it undesirable for the masses of consumers (e.g., performance issues involving HFS+ extended attributes, or the like), or if ZFS is just a feature Apple prefers to advertise for the server but (like the Apache server) ships on both desktop and Server even though the desktop isn't really billed as a web server. In other words, I'm not sure whether the feature is really only a server feature (or maybe a slick UI is confined to the server, but the rest is there) or whether there's a good customer support reason to keep ZFS in limited circulation. I wouldn't be surprised to have ZFS enabled as a boot volume installation option in an optional panel, at least at some point upgrade. Folks with big towers would really like the improvements ZFS offers, I'd wager.
Take care,
--Tex.
re projecting ... clearly?
Between the well-publicized concerns about the 1.0 product (no 3rd party apps, slow EDGE, must unlock to use off an official carrier, etc.) and the fact Apple wasn't really doing anything active to promote the phone outside a couple of discrete markets with carrier partners in place, I think we should be ready for the possibility that the 2.0 rollout with real advertising and promotion effort begins showing results, they will look very good indeed.
As an owner of what was originally bought as an early G5 iMac (after three or four motherboard replacements, Lord only knows what computer is inside now), I can say avoiding the 1.0 product has a certain sense to it. On the other hand, I've loved by iPhone -- mostly because I so despised my RAZR and its abysmal UI.
So, while you may be projecting, I think it's a good bet you are projecting a clear image of the future
With smart phone sales doubling in N. America while Apple was letting the channels run largely dry and telegraphing to the world that the new product was coming in just a few months, imagine what Apple might pull off with all cylinders firing again?
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080606/tec_smart_phones.html?.v=1
I predict iTunes-style announcements of "100k served" and "1 million served" and so on pretty soon after the App Store goes live. This has got to be a good thing for Apple, too.
Take care,
--Tex.
PS I sure would like to discover GPS is for real. That would so rock. Enough stuff like that, and Apple will be in a great position to make deals with car mfgs for integration kits that will allow maps, search, etc. to be accessed from the dash, and music to be controlled from the steering wheel, and the speakers to be muted for hand-free phone calls. A feature set like that would seriously impress, if it could be shipped.
re channel refill?
I agree resellers' the lack of product to sell likely explains sales share loss. I think the report from customs declarations about the "digital computers" importation suggests there's a growing stockpile waiting to fill the demand, so Apple shouldn't be terribly behind the curve satisfying the demand.
The real question is, how much demand can Apple really create, to swamp its ability to produce? If the keynote and release create enough demand from new market segments (I know physicians who've been waiting on 2.0 to get ePocrates, for example, because they didn't want to part with it by ditching Palms; and maybe Apple can sell to enterprise, at least with T's help?), then Apple's launch might be pretty big (considering the additional geographies and the possibility of simultaneous launch, the first few weeks might be big).
I think there's a difference between tuning a kernel for a constrained environment and having an entirely separate OS for different platforms, and that Apple is likely to reuse everything it can. Whether Apple really needs a different kernel, or a different set of frameworks for certain parts of Cocoa, is something I think Apple's in a good position to figure out and execute. I happen to think that resource optimization won't work against performance on larger machines, but will just result in faster, more correct code (think OpenBSD). Tuning certain parameters in the kernel so it behaves properly in a super-constrained environment (relative to a desktop) is absolutely certain, though, and it doesn't necessarily mean a whole different OS; it just means a build tuned for a specific platform, and I think that makes perfectly good sense.
Remember, one of the points of Darwin was to have cross-platform capability. There's no reason for Apple to really run two OSses. The integration between Cocoa and the OS is tight enough (Cocoa depending on the existence of Mach primitives, etc.) that Apple isn't going to do very well resource-wise if it wants to re-engineer Cocoa to run atop some different kernel. All the real-time stuff Apple has in Cocoa is all very dependent on specific tech in the kernel, that would have to be reimplemented of the kernel would be swapped out for some stripped-down lightweight BSD kernel. Or do you think maybe that was the explanation for the iPhone release date, and the delay of Leopard?
Might be interesting to see just how much code they can and can't reuse, but I think the preference must be toward code reuse and against utterly different OSses.
Take care,
--Tex.
re divergent?
Since the iPhone runs OSX Leopard, why would one conclude that "the future is calling" creates a 3-card lineup showing divergence?
I'd think the show would be about Leopard, with extra attention to the future of Leopard as a platform for Apple's device that now supports calling.
As for Lango's comment, I'm not sure I follow: why would Apple try to keep two versions of OSX wherever there was an opportunity for unity? I appreciate that Apple will be shipping (has been shipping) a kernel that's pared down and tuned specially for the iPhone, but I don't see why OSX Slim need derive from a different code base than the general OSX.
As for upgrade revenue on mobile phones, I can't really guess. So far, Apple's story is that while it's amortizing the sale across 24 months, Apple will be rolling out updates without charge. That doesn't apply to iPod Touch, which has the same OS and no amortization schedule. Will we see Apple rolling out for-sale upgrades to folks outside 24 months, or will we see a change in accounting, or will we see some complex explanation why folks should be happy to plunk down $80 for a cell phone software upgrade while they're paying monthly for service? Personally, I have a hard time buying that after this 2.0 release (free of charge), Apple will have much more to add that would possibly make people think $80 is a good buy. I'm much more of the opinion that Apple will want to let folks load up on $5 to $50 applications that make their devices more useful, and quaff from the 30% flood.
As for dotMac, I'd be happy to see a serious online offering from Apple, especially one that allowed higher-volume remote backup, though of course US 'broadband' speeds make this kinda rough to consider using so far.
One cool feature I'd like: bluetooth cell modem capability for mobile users. If 3G is so fast, let's use it as our mobile internet, no? I'm not sure how carriers would price this kind of service (I expect it'd be a bandwidth hog), but it's something I've wanted to see since launch day.
Take care,
--Tex.
Javascript to speed up in Safari
Safari is replacing its already-optimized syntax-tree-walking Javascript interpreter with SquirrelFish, a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention, which lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.
http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/
The short story is given by the performance graph. Safari's Javascript speed is over 4x faster under Squirrelfish than it was under Safari 3.0, and they have ideas how to make it faster.
This kind of super-optimization will be of real utility as Apple pushes performance constraints in new products. I think this kind of work is a reason why Apple may be working to push people onto Cocoa increasingly more harshly: Cocoa's architecture makes it easier to offer hardware-specific optimizations, even at runtime, due to Cocoa's runtime linking. The inheritance of Cocoa enables developers to optimize certain types of tasks and make them available through frameworks to every other developer to come along on the platform, none of whom need know anything about how the optimizations work, just what calls to make to get the job done.
I think this kind of environment is pretty awfully cool, in concept. I hope it pays off as I imagine.
Take care,
--Tex.
re foundations for ZFS
You can run ZFS now, as I understand it. There's an open-source project for it and you can build a .kext.
(for example, here's a review of same: http://www.red91.com/articles/2008/01/21/using-zfs-with-leopard )
The question is whether Apple will make it the default FS. There was a discussion here a while back about how ZFS seemed to rock for a bunch of Unix demands, but might face performance issues if ordered to produce all the extended attributes ordinarily relied upon by MacOS X and its various tools and apps.
I think ZFS would be a great boon for solving enterprise storage issues, and would let Apple sell into lots of places with backup concerns. Frankly, if network speeds would support it I'd think that an Apple offering of offsite backup would be very attractive to subscribers with typical hard drive sizes. I've got <1TB of data, and some of it (photos of kids, etc.) would really suck to lose in a local catastrophe such as a fire. Businesses would certainly be interested in data security and backup.
Of course, businesses would be interested in seeing major industry-specific apps available on MacOS X, too ... law, medicine, real estate ... it's not like these industries' use of computers is trivial or don't sum into real money.
Take care,
--Tex.
getting both
"Customers get both," he said. "I don't know how you can do better than getting both."
I'd think that getting the old one at the old price would be better than being forced to buy a non-upgrade one hopes to avoid merely to be able to use what used to be cheaper.
But the real winner is the "pre-downgraded" PC and what it says about desire for Vista, and what it suggests about MSFT's claims about Vista sales (if they're selling XP under the Vista wrapper, they're not really selling Vista, are they?).
Take care,
--Tex.
gristly greybeards
The folks with the biggest problem will, of course, be the folks with the longest history of Mac development -- history that left them with a big existing code base when MacOS X hit, causing them to go the Carbon route in order not to lose limitless time re-coding everything in Cocoa.
Apple has given people a period of maybe six years -- from the beta in '01 until now -- to react to the appearance of Cocoa, and much of this has been time after Apple made it clear new functionality was Cocoa-only.
Compare MS-Windows: 8-bit DOS programs are apparently still supported to some degree or another.
The downside of Apple migrating people forcefully into the future is that it may worry folks considering a long-term deployment: they may look at the currently-stuck folks, and imagine it's a mirror into the future. The upside is that Apple can cut the cruft out, and by shipping less code have more time to make sure it's right. I'm not sure whether MSFT is really trying to go Cocoa with MS-Office, but leaving longtime developers like ADBE and MSFT with no avenue into the future is rough. How long do you imagine that Rosetta will continue to be updated for MacOS X/Intel? Would either ADBE or MSFT be satisfied to deliver products in such an environment?
The upside to Apple's optimization push is that Apple can finally do something about drivers that don't deliver under MacOS X what they deliver on MS-Win, and so forth. Apple's efforts to produce a solid gaming platform, on which real, multithreaded game design is plausible and on which 3D audio is easy to come by and in which a diverse arrangement of monitors is readily handled might also be of some use in luring more high-end users to Mac platforms. The fact Apple is going to be giving away a handheld game platform ... er, an iPod Touch ... with every Mac until September to anyone who can produce student ID or a plausible claim to be involved in home schooling (or maybe an implausible one; who knows what they will turn out to require) suggests that Apple may be interested in getting its platform the biggest possible launch (and drowning claims about its competitors).
The fun part of "free iPod with computer" is that Apple isn't tying a new product to one in which Apple has some kind of market power, it's tying a product in a category in which Apple arguably has market power to a product in which Apple is a smaller vendor. Although the "smaller vendor" moniker pales when one looks at profit share rather than unit share. Heh.
Snow Leopard, is it? Leopard, upgraded? I'll buy that. If the performance improvements are good, I think lots of folks will buy it. Makes me wonder what Apple will roll out as the "must have feature" for it, though.
Take care,
--Tex.
10.6?
TUAW claims 10.6 beta is due for release to developers, and encourages folks to speculate on the code name.
I like Lynx because it sounds like Links, and suggests connectivity, interoperability, and utility -- things that might be nice to suggest if one were targeting enterprise and IT shops with administrator-friendly features and targeting consumers with devices that should all talk together, share information, and keep one's life organized.
Of course, I've ruminated over Apple in enterprise enough here. Either they see it's useful (or are being dragged there by partners like T), or they won't. The evidence is that they certainly used to do nothing at all to approach enterprise, and even seemed to shun the business, but ... Apple can't be so silly as to neglect an opportunity to pull an NT on MSFT's costly-to-run OS (ie, pitch an alternative as easier to manage and more flexible and more accessible, as NT did to Unix in the '90s) ... can it?
Ahh, well.
Take care,
--Tex.
Touch promo
Buy Mac, get free iPod Touch:
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/06/04/apples-back-to-school-promo-buy-a-mac-get-free-ipod
Good 'till September. I'm thinking Apple's interest in growing the new touch-based platform is very high ... that Apple wants to be able to reach zillions with the App Store. Here's hoping it works.
I've gotta see some of the accelerometer-based games in action. But the more I think about it ... the more I wonder about the 3D/5.1-Surround support in phone-based games. That has to be part of a larger move toward a platform improvement for the Mac, and toward seducing the high-end tower guys to go Mac by attracting developers interested in taking advantage of cool tech.
Take care,
--Tex.
any news on E-Sea spinoff?
I'd rather see E-Sea's success show up on the bottom line than end up with more often-hard-to-trade securities, but I'm not particularly married to particular ideas about how ETLT should create value from its assets.
I'd just like to see cash flow, and earnings. I'd think the turtle farms, fruit operations, and so on should be great businesses in a country with growing population and growing standards of living. And I read China may dump its 1-child policy, which would eventually drive up food consumption. Owning food-producing real estate (or having long term leases for it) should be a good position in that case.
Anyone have thoughts or information?
Take care,
--Tex.
re CDS as cash-producing
CDS is making money, but doesn't pay dividends; I like it, and I own it myself, but it would not create liquidity for CAAH unless shares were sold. CDS might offer an opportunity for a gain but I don't see it as creating cash flow. CDS would rather plow money into new deals than pay a dividend, if I gauge management properly.
This one seems like a turnaround as well?
What, CDS or CAAH? CAAH just reinvented itself as a holding company full of Chinese businesses, but its second pick business was unable to produce the kind of verifiable accounting information required by US companies that want to be taken seriously, so CAAH ended up only in Aohong, and not Big Tree.
CDS isn't so much a turnaround as a growth story. Their core competence is sizing up Chinese acquisition targets, but their past success makes their stock largely driven by the behavior of magnesium prices, as one of its home-runs earlier was in a magnesium producer. CDS has been reinvesting to grow that business and it's apparently doing well. However, CDS is all about doing deals with Chinese companies, like helping CAAH find acquisition targets.
Take care,
--Tex.
Wild speculation
CAAH thought it was buying two Chinese operating subsidiaries (well, enough of a stake that they would consolidate the subsidiaries' financial statements), and ended up holding $445k in CDS. Whether or not it's interesting to hold $445k in CDS, it seems likely that management would rather have cash-producing assets and would be looking to exchange some of the CDS for a stake in a Chinese subsidiary (not in the toy business).
Since (a) CDS has an ongoing relationship with CAAH to promote it, and (b) CDS' core strength is doing due diligence in Chinese acquisition targets, it seems likely that CAAH would want to get in line to take the best deal CDS dreams up next. Consequently, I expect CAAH to have a big leap in its earnings once that deal occurs, and CAAH ends up owning another cash-producing foreign subsidiary.
The question seems to be CAAH's time line in getting a good candidate, and whether CAAH will be patient enough to wait for the right deal. Is there any reason CAAH should be desperate?
Take care,
--Tex.
re 10AM
At 10AM, I'll be on a plane to the Netherlands' territory St. Maarten for my sister's birthday (and my oldest daughter's). So, I'll be unable to stand in line for a short :(
On the other hand, this mall is near Tomball -- a growing suburb where folks move to get decent square footage for their homestead dollars. Nice area, but I'd hate to have a commute that led me from there into town and back daily. The upside: the area is crawling with every kind of business you can imagine; lack of zoning has some upside.
I expect an Apple Store near Tomball to get good traffic from folks who hate fighting their way into the Galleria, and folks who currently traffic the mall. Apple's decision to take good real estate advice in siting its retail stores was an example of a worthwhile decision. Apple's retail stores probably do more to proselytize the unwashed than nearly any other kind of promotion or educational program Apple could have launched, and siting these where folks will be roaming anyway is a Good Thing™.
Take care,
--Tex.
location, location ...
... location:
Why try to be seen by a few thousand already-converted Frenchmen when you're about to open your "first official Apple Store for France, located at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris" which will "occupy two floors and 7,700 square feet" and is on the footpath for "some 9 million people ... annually, including 40 percent of tourists."
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/06/02/apple.foregoes.apple.expo/
Yowza. That's some heavy traffic passing by. My question: how to avoid the famous French customer service, and offer instead something that will actually build positive feelings about the company and its products. Presumably Apple has a plan ...? If not -- what a hell of a way to offend millions of customers a year!
Take care,
--Tex.
new BoardInfo
I tried to track the language of the latest 10-Q:
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1093903/000116169708000551/form10-q.txt
I tried to make clear that the company's prospects for revenue growth currently seem focused on the development of Chinese refrigerants business. The quote about not trying to build the identification business is straight from the last report.
Now that CAAH is out of the toy business, it'll be interesting to see what CDS will find CAAH as a possible acquisition target. Does the fact Big Tree never managed to produce a useful accounting statement mean CAAH will get a sympathy discount off its next deal? In the meantime, holding $445k in CDS shares could work in CAAH's favor: CDS has been pummeled a bit, but its revenues seem largely influenced by successes in the metals industry in China ... and raw materials can't be getting cheaper, with industrialization getting underway and worldwide prices for metals getting higher.
Take care,
--Tex.
Store open 'meñana', natch ;) em
Notice: BoardInfo is Outdated
The Boardinfo claims Big Tree Toys is a subsidiary of CAAH. This hasn't been true since early May:
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/080505/caah.ob8-k.html
Also, describing CAAH as a company that "designs, develops, manufactures and sells fingerprint-based identification products and systems that incorporate biometric technology to verify a person's identity" when essentially all its revenues come from Chinese chemical business is somewhat misleading. CAAH is a holding company with two operating companies, one of which likes to say it "designs, develops, manufactures and sells fingerprint-based identification products and systems that incorporate biometric technology to verify a person's identity" but has little revenue at present and slight personnel for developing its products though it may be involved in licensing arrangements ... and it's got another subsidiary that actually produces revenue, one in China doing a chemical business (refrigerants, fire suppression, etc.).
Take care,
--Tex.
Out of the toy business
I just noticed the early-May announcement that CAAH isn't in the toy business any more. Big Tree wasn't able to produce proper accounting information (apparently, Sarbanes-Oxley is hard to apply to folks who insist on paying employees in cash to evade taxing authorities, or the like) so CAAH sold its interest in Big Tree back to its former owner in exchange for about $445K in CDS shares. Good news: CDS is looking up!
CAAH is presumably looking for a new acquisition target, one that is capable of performing in accordance with accounting and oversight requirements. In the meantime, CAAH's revenues are all resulting from the company with the refrigeration products contracts.
If anyone learns what happened, if anything, with the shares CAAH issued to Big Tree's owner when it made its purchase, let me know. I'd like to know whether turning $400k into $445k in CDS shares was a plain-faced win, or whether there's still dilution to worry about.
Take care,
--Tex.
promising rumor: GPS!
iPhone may have real GPS hardware, courtesy of Broadcom parts:
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/30/broadcom.gps.in.3g.iphone/
If so, this'd be great for making use of the maps. This has been my biggest concern thus far about location on the phone -- it's sucked. The next question is whether, being powered only on demand, it may be kept from sucking battery life too badly.
Take care,
--Tex.
re gloss
Asked whether Apple had the jump on multitouch, Ballmer evades:
There's a lot in Windows 7, and our goal's got to be, with our hardware partners, to produce fantastic PCs. ... We'll sell 270m PCs a year, and Apple will sell 10m. Apple is fantastically successful, and so are we.
As usual, Ballmer's numbers are interesting. The 270m OS licenses MSFT expects to sell (MSFT doesn't sell PCs generally, PC makers do that) aren't broken into categories that would help listeners understand how many machines are handheld inventory control systems, how many are notebook/tablet convertibles for use managing patient records (and unlikely to run any other third-party application), how many are ATM machines, and so on.
MSFT's trailing twelve month income attributable to common shares seems to be about $16B, whereas Apple's is about $4B. The 270m-to-10m comparison doesn't really capture the effectiveness of the two companies' different business models at wringing profit out of units. To hear Ballmer, you'd think earnings at Apple would be a few millions.
I'm interested to see what the next few years brings. Apple has until 2010 (the expected date of MSFT's Windows 7, though we know how that can move) to leverage anything it can to gain share where long-term revenues will flow from regular upgrades in market segments that buy and buy and buy all the livelong day (e.g., large enterprises), before MSFT breeds a new pig to replace the one it's currently foisting on its vict-- ahem -- customers. MSFT has many smart people, and they aren't unaware how to code or how people like to use computers. Given enough time (and maybe given competent leadership) I'm sure MSFT could wrangle a solution that could offer feature and performance competition with whatever it needed to beat. The company just seems to be dancing with two left feet in casts of late, though, and seems to expect to prevail over competition out of a religious conviction of their inevitable victory rather than from some realistic plan to identify and meet some serious consumer demand.
Ballmer and Co. will surely keep pumping out hundreds of millions of OS licenses a year. My question is what share they can keep of the highest-end segments of the market, where folks want to do diverse things with their machines and will be buying third party software and shelling out upgrade fees rather than junking their soon-dead boxes for a new pile of fire-sale OEM-prepared white-box schlock.
When I see Apple releasing iPhone with 3-D/5.1 surround audio for games, I see Apple positioning its products to go after all sorts of market segments where there's money and upgrades and high performance and add-on software and service sales. I have no idea how Apple will turn the availability of improved under-the-hood dev tech (CoreData? CoreAnimation?) into real-world, delivered applications ... but if Apple's share of the high-end market is really exploding like some of the recent reports suggest, perhaps Apple is closer than I thought to seducing developers into targeting its platform with the main thrust of development. That would, in my view, signal the end of the hegemony enjoyed by the Win32 API and its relatives.
However, we're a long way from that. In 2001, Carmack of Id said he hoped to release simultaneously on Win32 and MacOS X, and I still have the sense Apple's game title catalog lags in both time and performance with "originals" targeting a MSFT platform.
Having read Carmack's critique of a then-new graphics card and discussing drivers, though, I wonder whether Apple is targeting different users with its drivers than vendors are targeting with drivers released for the MS-Win market. In other words, are conformance compromises made for performance on Win not acceptable on MacOS, given MacOS' effort to target creative professionals with a high demand for visual correctness? Would Apple be doomed by drivers to performance issues? Or is the MacOS design and better utility of multiple processors likely to ensure that a made-for-MacOS game would be quite a bit better, and that it's only monolithic ported-from-MSFT titles that lag in performance?
Who knows. I do see Apple gaining mindshare and selling more machines than folks expected, and I don't see Apple yet dipping into loss-leader territory in Macs. I see Apple's profit growth doing well, and its per-unit profit growth being aided by things like AppleCare and the App Store and its own application suites and upgrade revenues from iLife and so on. I expect the earnings gap between the companies to become more modest, even though MSFT prints an order of magnitude more Certificates of Authenticity than Apple ships whole computers.
It'll be an interesting game to see played out. Both companies are now pretending there's no longer an OS war and that MSFT has won, even as Apple seems to be fighting tooth and nail to claw back the very best part of the market for keeps. Ballmer pretends to be unconcerned about Apple's various consumer and portable initiatives, passing them off as curiosities that can't impact MSFT's huge-volume marketing machine, and Apple pretends to be uninterested in warring over OS, game consoles, or the like.
And beneath the pretense, I see there is war renewed.
Take care,
--Tex.
try flip4mac for wma? em.
re the done deal
If Apple could offer a worldwide service plan and real opportunity to replace RIMM's push email and enterprise app integration, it'd become the to-have phone for the highest-using, highest-profile, highest-ARPU, most-heavily traveling segment of the market (top-dollar international talent in business consulting, energy support, etc.). A real international plan might not be a big deal for many Americans, but I expect it'd amount to quite a bit in places where borders are close together -- I'm looking at you, EU and Africa.
I would imagine this to be pretty hard to set up -- after all, tariffs must vary terribly by geography and government regulation, so pricing would be a bear -- but if it's possible ... wow.
I was irked when I got to the EU and found my T-Mobile userID and password I used at Starbucks didn't work at T-Mobile in EU or UK. A real international plan would rock.
Maybe as a premium feature?
Take care,
--Tex.
WebKit adoption grows
Atop the existing heap (Apple, Nokia, and Adobe) who have implemented rendering solutions using WebKit for its heavy lifting, we now have Samsung. Samsung's press corps seems to have a little issue with the distinction between WebKit and Safari, though:
http://www.phonearena.com/htmls/Samsung-L870-is-Symbian-S60-slider-with-Safari-browser-article-a_2834.html
Ahh, well.
The fact that Air and Dreamweaver are using WebKit are likely better harbingers of good things than the fact seldom-browsing mobile platforms have adopted it, though. Incidentally, a brokerage that used not to work on iPhone/Safari now seems just fine on the iPhone.
IE seems to still be slipping in share, which is good news for folks who are interested in standards -- and the IE share is fractured across a couple different versions with different standards-adoption. I think the future likely holds a world in which doctype declarations eventually push people onto browsers which know how to handle the declared doctypes properly. It won't be overnight, of course, but I think it's a good trend -- and having content-creation tools like Dreamweaver based on a standards-compliant widely-used engine (well, for folks who want the live view) will be helpful for getting at least those users in line with the times.
Take care,
--Tex.
re power consumption and solar
Now, 5-10 years from now, maybe some mobile devices will be so low in power (like the solar calculators), and solar cell $/watt improved, that maybe some of this makes sense. So maybe that is why they are going for a patent now? That's my best guess.
By the time there are no moving parts in any iPods and we've had a few generations of display and processor power decreases, the modest output of indoor solar might be enough to do something useful, and I assume that's what they're targeting. Bright full-color backlit music-player screens and rotating hard disks aren't really the right device to push onto the solar calculator power model.
I haven't seen any indication what kind of photovoltaic tech Apple might envision, either. Its cost and environmental impact may be different by that day, too. And maybe Apple hasn't any specific plan to deploy, but wants to bolster its patent portfolio.
Stranger things have happened.
Take care,
--Tex.
re enviromath
A solar panel mounted at the optimum angle to the sun, and exposed to sunlight all day takes about two years to generate more energy than it took to manufacture it. So a phone solar cell occasionally in the sun will never re-coup the energy it consumed to produce it.
I'm not sure this is the right comparison for a battery-powered mobile device. After all, such a device hasn't got the alternative of grid-supplied A/C power. Perhaps a comparison to the cost of manufacture of replacement batteries, or some measure of the opportunity cost of having to divert to an A/C source for recharging, would be worth considering.
On the other hand, I suspect the light source is most likely interior fluorescent lighting, which would have rather different (inferior) characteristics with respect to supplying photovoltaic recharging systems. Moreover, my phone spends most of its time in my pocket. The time the face actually sees the light of day is a small subset of time actually in use. When in use for talking my phone's screen is pressed against my (opaque) cheek. Bluetooth headset users might have even less faceplate exposure to light sources.
My impression? The tech might be useful on a larger tablet that isn't going to be stuffed into a pocket, but which isn't going to be fixed in place like a desktop and wouldn't be a good candidate for grid-supplied A/C, either.
Other impression? This is the kind of tech Apple might patent to keep ready for licensing arrangements without any intent to ship. On the other hand, consider music players. I often have my player exposed to the light while it's running, playing music, and if the rate at which the player recharged from typical artificial lighting were much of a fraction of the rate at which players expended energy to process and play music, it could be a boon for some users. I note, here, that there isn't a convenient A/C recharging opportunity on intercontinental flights, and this has caused me some inconvenience in the past (especially when I end up in a foreign airport, trying to recharge my electronics by plugging them into the wall, so local security sees a bunch of A/C cables heading into my backpack ... they get pretty excited, oddly enough ...). I also note that there are quite a few folks who use armband holders when they run outdoors, with the faces of the players exposed to the sunlight (or the gym equipment). So, maybe this is a bigger deal for player users than for phone users.
Take care,
--Tex.
re phone revenues
As I see these announcements, I keep wondering what Apple is doing to make its deal more attractive to carriers, and whether Apple thinks the app store revenues are a place from which to draw sacrificed profits, or will maintain that revenue stream exclusively as gravy.
I foresee a market for localization specialists to translate .lproj files' text into multiple languages in order to grow worldwide attractiveness of apps on one international app store -- assuming that's what Apple is rolling out. Folks with an app that works will want it in as many languages as possible, and Apple's tools for language support make that pretty easy for outside venders to provide. It can't be done aftermarket, though, or it'd screw up the app's checksum and it'd fail the signature verification, and Apple's apps are all apparently heading toward mandatory signatures.
Take care,
--Tex.
less is more?
In some markets, less-is-more may build interest, while elsewhere it may be taken for aloofness/disinterest ... I'd think it should be part of the decision package that requires some localized culturally-sensitive decision making.
In the US, where interest for Apple products is high, I think the blank slate comes off as a sign of cool and builds curiosity. In markets where the US has little presence, I'd think Apple should do better to come off with a more inviting presentation. In the case of Boston, I think the sign was definitely a response to local color and interest. Maybe the Australian signage will turn out to be similarly effective.
Just got done reading a series of posts on "what Apple needs to do to push MacOS X in the enterprise" and I have to say, there's a lot of folks whose 'advice' isn't informed by actual experience with the OS historically, or the past experience of Apple with different development models for the OS or parts thereof. The "Apple needs more OSS involvement" and "there's lots of OSS work on kernels Apple should leverage" are just dim in light of Apple's past history of actually showing live kernel bug tracking (now taken down) and the former site for open-source development of Darwin (which was taken in-house because the outside contributions weren't considered particularly substantial, and because it made it hard to work on support for new features when there was a need to keep some information secret). Apple may need to do some things to make itself more attractive to enterprise, but I think the first among them after June will be enterprise-specific (that is, per-enterprise) back-end support for voice-messages, push email, etc. After Apple makes a name for playing well with others, Apple can see about replacing fileservers, web servers, and other tools that cost a hell of a lot more to do with MSFT tools.
This "Apple needs to work better with OSS" stuff needs to be much more refined to make any sense, or it sounds ignorant of what Apple's tried. On the other hand, Apple has some code that's of broader interest than Apple's kernel -- like WebKit, in which several KDE developers are top-level contributors with review rights, and on which Apple, Nokia, and Adobe have built products. Interestingly, it seems Adobe's interest in having database access from Air may have been a driver of SQLite access via WebKit:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#Why_did_Adobe_choose_WebKit.3F ... and ...
http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does-html5-client-side-database-storage/
At any rate, Apple has some things to do, but some of the suggestions are just tripe. With respect to the retail stores, I'm inclined to give Apple credit for promoting them correctly, as the results thus far have been nothing less than stellar. Remember when folks were discussing them as loss-leaders designed to increase public awareness, as if they would be an expense like an ad campaign?
Take care,
--Tex.
what it means
I think it means there's an optical drive on the premises, but like Barnum's sign "To The Egress" intended to move folks along (despite that they weren't interested in exiting the show), this one is intended to make folks think the door handle isn't worth trying.
Take care,
--Tex.
re enterprise
It's interesting to me to look back at the image accompanying Apple's SDK release presentation announcement (pictured here)
http://www.macworld.com/article/132275/2008/02/sdk.html?t=239
and to realize the most easily spotted thing on the page is the leftmost word ENTERPRISE.
I'm wondering whether Apple may be experiencing a sea-change in its attitude towards enterprise, as it realizes that it could offer back-end support for mobile devices, storage and servers (filesystem, web, collaboration, virtual conference rooms, other server applications) for organizational needs generally, and need not avoid enterprises in order to remain a vender of high-end parts for people with creative needs.
Curious.
Am I downwind from a big bong, or might Apple finally be doing something productive in the enterprise space?
Take care,
--Tex.
on dominating profitable niches
If the reported data on the $1000+ desktop market has anything true in it at all, Apple has got at least a decent toehold in the high-end desktop (for some definitions of high-end desktop). Perhaps Apple is now moving to broaden its occupancy of the high-end desktop by courting gaming platform suppliers:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/05/23/emotion.fx.engine.on.mac/
Interesting if true. Maybe one day we can get releases on Mac without a couple years' delay. Maybe vendor-backed high-end boxes will attract a certain class of high-end gamer, and Apple will be able to leverage this toward moving Mac content to folks' high-end entertainment systems. I'm not knowledgeable on this market (games, or the new generation of high-end entertainment systems) but it's entertaining weekend speculation.
Take care,
--Tex.
PS In the post office, I saw a poster promoting "Dog Bite Prevention Week" -- hilarious, if you ask me. The top line cautioned folks from believing "my dog doesn't bite!" I thought immediately of Cluseau. Hee hee.
unknown event in Canada? uh-huh
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/23/apple.canada.prep/
Like there's doubt what event is coming up?
Take care,
--Tex.
the living room -- but when?
I read this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/19137/Apple-Daydreaming%3A-Report-Predicts-Move-Toward-Home-Devices
... but I think they convey the wrong idea about how quickly Apple can really achieve an offensive against the world's living rooms. Think about how afraid Apple has content providers. Apple will have a lot of friction building the entertainment content deals needed to facilitate achieving the living room.
Take care,
--Tex.
re lock-in
It's nice to hear Apple's revenue-split is a good deal for Apple and its partners ... but ....
... are revenue split deals plausible on an ongoing basis in light of the scale of the unlocking phenomenon?
Take care,
--Tex.
re exit-ment
Yeah, there's been a lot of that over the last week. It's hell on my Jan calls, too. At least the recovery from 115 or so has shrunk my unrealized loss on those options.
I thank MA and my MA calls (with the same strike price as my AAPL calls) though: they keep me feeling good. I guess a net purchase price of AAPL in the range of 90 or so doesn't hurt, either.
Let's face it, though: creating a new floor in the range of 180 ain't too bad, considering Ace promised us we were doomed at 160 or so in Jan.
Hmm. I should avoid temptation to create revenue with covered calls while WWDC looms. I think June/Jul will be a great time for AAPL. I'm trying to imagine what the lineup of presenters will look like, and so on.
Ahh, well. Off to do billable work!
Take care,
--Tex.
re keeping it up
Since the revenue is coming from Chinese subsidiaries, I think the question is really whether the Chinese companies' businesses are going to perform as the due diligence suggests. Since due diligence in Chinese companies is CDS' strong suit, and CAAH's acquisitions are the result of cherry-picking the best of CDS' proposals, I'm inclined to think the success will continue, because I believe the Chinese subsidiaries will perform as expected as China continues to grow and industrialize.
My big question is whether the Chinese revenues enable CAAH to pay off the sellers of the interests in the Chinese companies. If the Chinese companies don't perform, CAAH can't make the payments it's got to make under the contracts to buy the interests that are producing the revenue. So it's imperative that CAAH's subsidiaries produce, or CAAH is screwed.
I plan holding CAAH for some time. I think it's going to be a Good Thing™.
Take care,
--Tex.
real estate investments?
I think that getting a good deal is good, but that getting good use is better. Does Apple do its own data back-end on its high-volume web properties, or is this all contracted out to folks like Akami?
The idea Apple got property for 1/3 the going rate is pretty slick, and makes me happy Apple (a) had the cash flexibility to do the deal quickly enough to make it work, and (b) has the sense to have sharp folks sussing out the deals on its strategic investments.
Pity they are more geared toward real estate and not toward software vendors who might help Apple crack medical, legal, accounting, and other professionals with sophisticated data security needs.
Hmm. When bandwidth gets good enough in the US, a big datacenter like that might enable dotMac to include off-site commercial backup as a high-margin service. That would be pretty cool. Unfortunately, US bandwidths are pretty crummy value compared to some northern European countries, per Mossberg.
Thanks for the update on the data center. It certainly makes one curious what data-intensive needs Apple hopes to address with the acquisition. In-house demand (iTMS?)? Support for future data services? Pure speculation?
Ahh, the excitement of AAPL!
Take care,
--Tex.
YHOO/MSFT
This was definitely a giggle, though it doesn't bode well for an independent YHOO:
"Pickens joining the fray adds inevitability to an outcome where Microsoft ends up with some or all of the company," Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates said.
He added: "These oil-patch guys have tons of money, but it must be humiliating for the brilliant software types at Yahoo to be pushed around by dudes who don't know a procedure call from a cattle call."
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/microsoft-unveil-cash-back-search/story.aspx?guid=%7B6F299525%2D0098%2D4CDA%2D98F5%2DD2CD4B679612%7D&siteid=yhoof
Oh, that's rich.
Sad, but rich.
Take care,
--Tex.
re free dotMac
Apple did free dotMac a long time ago, when it promised free email for life. I think Apple's backpedaling on this was no accident. Apple doesn't want to have to view its installed base as an ongoing liability, or face media attacks for the quality of what it does for free, or face cracker attacks by freeloaders looking to get something for nothing. The subscription plan solves all these: only people who like the service, or who find $99 trivial, remain customers. DotMac is thus a revenue generator, even if it's a poor value by some (not unreasonable) standards.
I think Apple has decided to enable a variety of dotMac synch technologies to see if it can improve the service's value via the network effect: if more and more tech depends on dotMac, it'll be worth the $99 to more and more people, and Apple can rake the revenue without putting out a lot of expense.
A premium service offered for free will simply invite more attacks by folks who want to access the services from a Java client running on Linux or MS-Windows, for free. Apple learned this the hard way and doesn't want back into that game. I think what Apple should do is to enable more valuable features so that those in the program really enjoy their experience. In my case, I bailed because backup.app was a toad and I could never get it to back up or restore, which pretty much makes it worthless. Moreover, Apple's mail service is so slow folks I know who have it instruct me specifically to use a different email address whenever time is an issue. I've seen this at work personally while transmitting documents to friends from my machine to theirs while we're on the phone. The user's ISP is reliably much faster than Apple's dotMac mail, and there's no reason for it.
In the meantime, I say let Apple avoid the crackers looking for a free ride, avoid the bad press, and keep delivering to those who like what they get. Let Apple make money while figuring out how to fix the system.
As a customer, I give dotMac something between an F and a D-minus, based on my last use before canceling years ago, and having observed recent mail delays. As an investor, I hope Apple doesn't expose this kind of Charlie Foxtrot to the public at large. I say it's just as well nobody see this boondoggle.
Take care,
--Tex.