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It's been a while since I was here. Looks like you've kept Apple moving toward successive highs. Good work.
Any old-timers still here?
--Tex.
"My bet is, Apple remains number 2 for 3 Q's in a row. "
Uh, by what metric? Apple has continued to lead all cellular manufacturers combined in profit.
--Tex.
ApplePay isn't live yet.
http://bgr.com/2014/09/19/iphone-6-and-iphone-6-plus-apple-pay/
Apple's page on ApplePay says the feature is "coming in October"
https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/
Hope that helps.
I think ApplePay will benefit Apple not only by creating revenue, but by improving Apple's margins in its own transactions: Apple will be able to act as its own transactions processor at its own stores in all the transactions it previously paid transactions processors to process.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2465365-apples-position-supports-payment-processing-enterprise
Finding projections 2y out will be a trick; ACAS' business involves buying and selling portfolio companies, so knowing what businesses ACAS will own in 2y is not really even possible.
Berkshire Hathaway makes money buying companies, but its business model doesn't generally call for disposition: you know the company will be an insurance powerhouse and will own Dairy Queen, Orange Julius, etc. Reading BRK's balance sheet to learn the "value" of the company is no more easy, but its cash flow can be understood as coming from a relatively unchanging field of sources. ACAS' balance sheet is no more transparent, but since the businesses can change there's less freedom to make assumptions about the performance over time of an asset pool whose components change.
The reason to invest in ACAS, if any, is that its management has gained your confidence that it is doing better-than-market opportunity-spotting, and that its business model attracts you because you believe that the opportunity for "deals" is higher in the market for illiquid privately-held companies.
There's an old article that talks about this:
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/06/professional-stock-analyst-opinions.html
Note that having good management doesn't eliminate volatility:
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2009/03/malon-wilkus-big-margin-call.html
Take care,
--Tex.
The bigger story isn't the realization of $11m that could have already been reflected in NAV. The http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2011/02/acas-exits-trivin-above-fair-value.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" >http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2011/02/acas-exits-trivin-above-fair-value.htmlbigger story[/tag] is that the $11m wasn't already baked in.
The question that I have is according to FAS 157. In some investments, the gap between the investment's value to ACAS and its "fair value" under FAS 157 remains clear, but identifying the extent of this phenomenon is not trivial. Two years ago it was more obvious that the gap was irrational. The question now is just how big a gap remains.
I'm trying to make links in the sentences using the little buttons on the left of the post, which I haven't tried before. Usually I've posted on the AAPL board, and it's been a while.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Whipple complications
I haven't kept up with this, as I've been distracted. I think Jobs' statements on his health have several reasons that aren't fraudulent, and are likely tied up not only in his privacy kick but in the of-course-I-will-do-fine attitude that is so helpful both in entrepreneurs and in people recovering from serious illness.
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-jobs-health-and-on-apple.html
I think the real question is whether Apple, having allowed Jobs to chase off so many of the other alpha dogs, has within it the kind of people needed to herd the diverse array of talents in Apple to produce excellent products.
I'm studying for a licensing exam in another state and won't be back here much. I may also end up on a board that has fewer Forex and FXCM pop-ups.
Take care,
--Tex.
re new Mac desktops
Yeah, I have a G5 iMac that could use replacement. I'd also like to see the tower upgrades, and there IS a new Intel chip coming off the presses.
Who knows?
And here I thought those 110 puts were safe to sit short ....
Take care,
--Tex.
re 'this'
It's interesting the Gateway has twice the video RAM, and the same amount (4GB) of main RAM as the new Mac.
I think the DDR3 and GPU on the Mac are quality plusses, though. Without a bake-off, we'll not know. I think the Gateway is targeting features that people will notice (RAM size, screen size) and hoping to save money cutting corners where they need savvy to shop intelligently: RAM speed, GPU details. There's a reason Acer's market share (they bought Gateway, right?) is growing: people aren't extremely picky a lot of the time.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Pages
I would use Pages if it were (a) faster (it has lag so bad I have to wait to see what I typed, and I have to wait to see where I'm dragging pictures or boxes with text and pictures) and (b) more feature-rich (I tried to do things like change the font of the auto-numbered paragraphs and could not; it doesn't have support for things like turning text into and out of smallcaps, which may not matter to you but if you want to craft smallcaps without a smallcaps-specific typeface, other word processors will do it, and IBM's would even let you tweak the size of the small caps in the smallcaps so you could get any ratio you wanted).
I've actually created 50p documents with it, and shorter documents with pictures, and I have to say that although it was painfully slow its output was beautiful. Now if only Apple's PDF and the PDF at Kinko's would synch up so I didn't get weird printing artifacts at the front of paragraphs and the like ....
In short, Pages has some nice features, it makes beautiful output, and it has a serious future. I would prefer that Pages actually have a document format that made some kind of sense (the original was apparently a well-designed XML, but later updates hacked this all to hell) so it might be usable in other tools, or on other platforms, without risk of butchering it. Editing some of the text, for example, would be extremely valuable to be able to do in an XML editor if away from one's own shop.
Take care,
--Tex.
re pix
Thanks, Yofal. As it happens, your Acorn suggestion did the trick!
Many thanks!
Take care,
--Tex.
OT re photo edit
I actually tried GIMP, but I can't get it to run. I had X11 from my original install, but it didn't seem to help. So I tried downloading the new X11 suggested at the MacGIMP site, and it still didn't work.
Bummer, eh?
Any other ideas?
All I want to do is to make some of the background transparent, or cut it away. Putting people's faces on the wrong body should be a common-enough desire that this object should be readily available, no?
Ugh.
Thanks for the try
Take care,
--Tex.
OT re photos
I'm trying to cut a face from a picture so I can display it without the background. iPhoto won't do it, and neither will the couple of freeware Cocoa image editors I found. Photoshop Elements won't launch, complaining some file has gone missing, and I am happy to find an alternative. Ideas?
What do you call this kind of trimming? Cropping seems to be taking whole straight edges off, not reshaping a picture edge around an object in the picture.
Many thanks,
--Tex.
re Amazon rankings
I would have a hard time buying that Amazon's sales exceeded Apple Retail. On the other hand, I think that Amazon rankings are probably of some utility in the nature of a survey; Amazon purchases are may be (but I have no data) strongly associated with online purchases generally, meaning that the Amazon sample though relatively small might have utility as a sort of survey of online shoppers.
Apple's retail stores are deliberately placed in high-traffic spots, though, and are intended to capture folks who weren't looking to buy a Mac at all. In that sense, I think the Apple retail store is enormously important. On the other hand, as the Mac base grows, existing customers' upgrade cycles and additional family computers and so on may be coming largely from no-sales-tax online vendors and so on. I see Apple retail as indicative of the fire behind new-to-Mac growth, which could definitely hit a bump in the event of a depression hitting during a boom in $200 netbooks.
I don't get the idea Apple is selling badly this quarter, but Apple isn't competing with "badly" -- Apple competes against a public expectation of insane performance, and is apt to get hammered for turning in merely above-average results.
That said, the desktop line is definitely in need of a refresh. I've wanted a tower, but I've been waiting for the Next Big Thing in desktops before going for it. I've heard from others with the same thinking. If I'm made to wait much longer, I may end up with a high-end iMac, which will stave off "need" for long enough Apple will risk losing my next sale to a future Next Big Thing wait. Intel is supposed to be producing a new crop of suped-up chips, and I'm thinking the GPU advances should really clear the decks of graphics-related beach balls.
Hmm, and we're getting closer to Snow Leopard. Maybe we're seeing a hardware delay to coincide with the new OS. Features unsupported by the old OS? Who knows.
For the record, Tom's graphics may have some artistic license in them, but they are excellent at communicating the numbers in a beautiful way even if they don't help you drive to the stores. I note that profit and units are present, but not gross receipts or gross receipts from CPU sales. There's plenty of room for a "sort of true" result to be found in "Apple has had a rare decline" claims, if the right metric is picked. A dollar-value year-over-year result for US-only November retail sales, for example, would be hard to question from the data at hand. On the other hand, Apple's retail strategy has been useful in increasing Apple's profile outside the US, too. (link steals shamelessly from Tom's site for its visual aid)
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/06/selling-apples-all-over-world.html
The upshot from the article: the more non-US iPhones are sold, the more valuable the platform will be due to localization strategy in Cocoa app development. This could really grow into something big
I got to earn my actual income though, so I won't be investigating this just now
Take care,
--Tex.
re fit
Naturally, it would have to be a large head; those stores' customers don't all fit in a matchbook.
On the other hand, it's not a bad market to hit; there are quite a few people with real incomes who go there because they've bought prime shopping locations and it's convenient. It may be a plebeian brand, but there's a lot of money in plebes, if you can squeeze it out.
Take care,
--Tex.
re sales drop
Does it look different when the metric is dollars and not units?
The Y/Y desktop numbers in particular have done some wild gyrations, depending in large part on the hot-ness of the iMac line.
Take care,
--Tex.
re impact
I agree that transitioning to a world in which Jobs isn't carrying the water as the company's public face is good planning. I note that Apple designers and users appear in a number of videos about the products, and I suspect that getting engineers to talk about their areas of interest and expertise is probably going to be effective in highlighting new things to which attention should be given.
The natural interest of people in their own work is easily more genuine than Shiller's soda-pop-advert-style excitement about everything, every sentence, until you don't believe any of it is really exciting.
The fact that Apple has a huge public face in its retail stores is no joke; it's an opportunity to show products and demonstrate technology that used to REQUIRE a big event, and now is an everyday occurrence. I know folks who've bought Macs who never would have, because there was a store and they could use the product and see that it worked fine for what they needed. Much better than MacWorld (which preaches only to the faithful), and self-funding to boot.
Your last point is the best: if Apple had something to say, Apple could get people to appear on fairly short notice to film it and report on it, something that didn't used to be the case. I suspect that Apple's brand is big enough that's likely to continue even when Jobs' star-power isn't there to draw reporters. But the power of that draw shouldn't be understated; it's something to reckon with.
Take care,
--Tex.
re meaning
Dropping MWSF will leave the Developers' Conference as the major non-quarterly periodic news op, and shift more of the news spikes/plunges to things like unexpected product announcements and run-of-the-mill betting on the quarterly number.
The point about the need to think about a Jobsless Apple is real. My naked puts have a strike of 110 and expire a year from January, which until just recently I thought was pretty safe, given Apple's sales and profits trajectory. Based on the premium they now command, I find myself asking what it would take to do worse in a year from January than $80 a share. The fact pricing in so many things has gone bonkers prevents me from really feeling there's any way to have certainty about any price point, other than to say that at some point it's a sure long bet -- but after October, there's no way to believe things can't get worse from any other point, either.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Kindle
The Kindle deal is really an odd duck. Amazon apparently wanted to create a screaming, category-killing deal and offered free internet service with the hardware, with no apparent cutoff date. Amazon hopes folks will buy Amazon content, and it's apparently willing to subsidize some service while waiting for the eReader to produce.
For Apple -- a hardware maker which has found a way to take a cut of third-party IP revenues deployed on the device -- there's little incentive to subsidize the price of content or service. Thus, I don't see Apple producing Kindle competition (in the sense of free connectivity service on a reader) until service costs become so slight that Apple's cut of browser-generated revenue (remember, search revenue kickback is Mozilla's principal funding source) is enough to at least cover the cost of the service.
I can think of a few other ways to fund it, but they don't suggest to me that Apple would be producing devices with "free service" any time soon.
Take care,
--Tex.
re 'making out like a bandit'
Could you give a little color there, what it means to "make out like a bandit" with a sudoku app? Is this like a Christmas bonus, or an annual income?
Thousands? Tens of thousands? Lots of tens of thousands? Six figures?
I have no idea what folks are making on this, and I'd be keen to know
Take care,
--Tex.
Hubbard's Q1'09 OS announcement was interesting.
Hubbard's discussion of what Apple is doing under the hood is also interesting. He explicitly states Leopard's read-only ZFS is to enable compatibility with future versions of the OS, which implies that future versions of the OS will be creating ZFS volumes.
The OpenCL ratification suggests that the technology is far beyond the "we hope to code it one day" state in which I supposed this tech stood. This is an apparently widely-liked standard that is hoped to create demand for more aggressive hardware, and to invite development from a broad array of software writers ... who need not learn ActiveX v11 to leverage GPUs for general computing, and who need not guess in advance what kind of DSPs, GPUs, CPUs, etc. will be available in a user's machine. This will definitely have performance impacts on real-world software as it is deployed.
An announcement about early '09 Snow Leopard release would definitely provide excitement, and create a bolus of high-margin software sales. Who knows: if Apple fixes its cloud offerings, free-with-new-OS trial versions may create some subscription revenue, too.
I wonder what Snow Leopard will do to iPhone hardware components ....
Take care,
--Tex.
re value
The 8GB model and the 4GB model are both too small for a real audiophile. For one who isn't carrying a bunch of multimedia, though, 4GB is huge.
It's only my music collection that makes by 8GB seem crowded.
Take care,
--Tex.
OT Mexico
Mexico has a long tradition of being a non-democratic plutocracy. I'm not looking at the recent (nominally democratic) form of the state in making this conclusion, but the longer history. The state tends to nationalize to seize value and privatize to shed losing enterprises; access is more important than equity in determining outcomes of transactions with government.
The fact that there's a war for control of contraband transit routes is completely unsurprising. (What is interesting is that this comes as something of a contrast to the movement by Columbia toward the rule of law, but that's a different story.) If this were Pakistan, incoming politicians would be calling for military strikes by U.S. forces. This is, however, our good neighbor to the South.
The rules are different.
Take care,
--Tex.
re WalPhone
The idea of offering a small-capacity version for discount stores is interesting. It would be unlikely to appeal to the high-end users, who want space for applications, music, and pictures ... but it would offer Apple some sales units, some market share with which to boost the value of the App Store (the games may fit if the music doesn't), and an opportunity to show enterprises Apple can fill bulk orders for semi-custom requirements for the right deal.
Take care,
--Tex.
re 105%
I think the idea is that all corporate buyers aren't monogamous, and some will deploy different combinations of devices. I'd be interested in looking at the volumes of the expected deployments (which might be less easy to survey accurately) rather than just the number of deploying companies.
I hope Apple's growing share gives it an incentive to send some code audit teams through Apple's closed-source stuff looking for places where off-by-one, no-bounds-checking, misused system calls, and so on are taking place. This might be easier to do in Cocoa than in Darwin, since Darwin gets a huge code import at every major revision, making it harder to build incrementally an increasingly solid, tighter, faster code base.
Of course, that is the objective of Snow Leopard, no?
I think that should be a nice product ....
Take care,
--Tex.
OT New Star Trek movie
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-star-trek-movie-approaching-at-warp.html
Looks like an action flick.
Take care,
--Tex.
re touch keyboard
To make the keyboard work, it'd have to be multitouch, unless you really never rest your hands on it. Personally, I don't foresee enjoying keyless "typing" or successful touch-typing on a feedback-free keyboard with no tangible key edges. However, the display should work fine, and multitouch would probably be wonderful for some non-Roman alphabets or non-alphabet languages.
On the other hand, will users have to get used to MS-Win, or will Linux UI be improved into better usability, or ..?
The snow-leopard optimization that is probably of most interested to a graphics-intensive mobile device is the power to offload tasks to specialized sub-processors like the GPU. Apple's frameworks make it easier to deploy these kinds of changes than Microsoft would be able to. Microsoft hasn't got a launch-time linking system, so an update that took care of this kind of thing would likely require at minimum a recompile.
Take care,
--Tex.
re iPhone OS
The fact that Apple already has its OS running on something with a lot more resource constraint than the XO indicates that the project would not be particularly daunting. I think the XO -- having a keyboard and pointer -- would use a UI much more like Apple's notebooks' than its phones'. Assuming the touch screens aren't multitouch, you won't need much "extra" to make regular ol' MacOS X work with it: all a touch screen lets you do is click, or drag. The question is where you apply optimizations to address the resource constraints in the XO.
I suspect that Snow Leopard, reportedly a leaner quicker Leopard, is -- being designed in part to address resource constraints on the phone and to allow better performance with less overhead -- going to make this kind of offering a lot easier for Apple. It may also make it easier for Apple to launch products with embedded systems. All kinds of interesting things open up as computing becomes smaller and cheaper, and as programs become more efficient.
Interestingly, efficiency hasn't been a goal at Microsoft. I wonder if this kind of competition might be meaningful in the future. If I daydream about it, I can imagine Apple succeeding in enterprise by offering software/hardware solutions that do more for the same money, because the software is smarter about resource use and requires less power and less hardware for the same tasks. But Apple isn't interested in enterprise, eh?
Take care,
--Tex.
re "full featured"
I acknowledge that the phrase hasn't got a hard-and-fast meaning, but generally I expect it to mean -- and I intended it to mean there -- possessed of qualities one doesn't find on the discount end of the product spectrum. Interestingly, Apple's notebooks today rated a front-page link on CNN.com, above the fold:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/11/17/review.macbook/index.html
Some things I'd expect on a "full featured" notebook:
* actual onboard storage capable of accepting applications, media files, etc. without immediately having to jettison the drinking water as excess ballast. XO hasn't got much of this. Apple's notebooks now have the possibility of hundreds of gigs internally. I still blink when I think about this. It's an order of magnitude more storage than Apple shipped on its first firewire notebook.
* hardware-accelerated graphics with dedicated video memory to keep everything looking/feeling snappy when GUI apps and quality font rendering are at work all over the screen (and several layers of windows beneath what's visible). Apple's new NVidia chipset is pretty slick in this regard, it seems.
* no-compromise networking. Apple has had wireless built-in, and ethernet built-in, for some time now. As recently as last year I saw Dell models being sold with extra charge for certain network cards ... like you'd want to save $20 on the future of your connected machine. The new MacBook has 802.11n that is 802.11a/b/g-compatible, and 1000-Base-T via wire.
* a real processor, so you can work rather than wait for hourglasses or the like. The multi-core Intels shipping in the MacBooks are fast and good at handling the multithreaded stuff that ships with all Macs. The OS is also good at keeping them saturated.
* real RAM. The bus speed is part of this, as is the amount of storage. Good bus speed means decreased opportunity for bottlenecking, and quantity is important to prevent swap-thrashing and to keep the system behaving as one expects (despite opening numerous applications). OLPC's RAM quantity suggests it's really intended for fairly lightweight use. This isn't a criticism of the project: learning to program computers doesn't require badassed computers, just a decent compiler. Look at the stuff we used to send Man to the moon. Oh, wait -- that was a set of slide rules, wasn't it? At any rate, several gigs of RAM in a notebook is nice enough to call it full-featured in this day and age, and the 128MB situation on OLPC makes me wonder that the objective of the program isn't to force code refactoring to address resource constraints. Think of all the wattage we could save worldwide if everybody's code were more efficient ...
* adequate I/O. In this era of USB-everything, it's probably acceptable to have a couple of USB 2 ports -- especially if the processor speed is good enough that it can keep up with the CPU overhead of USB while doing other things. In the case of weak machines that don't have a system to which to offload I/O overhead (SCSI, Firewire, etc.), a weak CPU is tantamount to poor I/O. The video out jacks are important for presentations, and I note Apple's offering has got them.
* spiffy "extras". Luxury brands are distinguished in part by the frills they offer. In the case of Apple, things like the new machined case that give the machine a "more solid" feel, and the multitouch trackpad (the UI improvement over bizarro 3-and-4-key finger jujitsu is really nice), and the not-destroying-your-notebook-when-someone-trips-on-the-cable power adapters, are all nice finishes. As is a keyboard that lights up so you can see the keys in the dark. I mean ... nice.
At any rate, there are doubtless other "full featured" things you might like on a notebook -- like the ability to drop it from a moving vehicle without damage, and so on -- and there are firms that offer them. Apple isn't unique. Apple is just an apparently rare bird in being able to keep a full-featured product in Amazon's top-seller list. Others on the top-seller list aren't making the money Apple is, that's for sure -- even if their margins were as good (which they aren't).
Anyway, that was what I had in mind. Obviously, "full featured" doesn't have a spec sheet, as it moves with the times. Depending what you use your machine for, the spec list you would use as a minimum would be a bit different than another's. To each his own
Take care,
--Tex.
re dollar share
Even crazier than the dollar share is the profit share, if you look only at hardware manufacturers. However, since Apple is also carrying the water on the software side, one has to look at the OEM software vendors to see who's profiting from computer sales that aren't just computer builders. Microsoft is still making a killing, it's just doing it at the apparent expense of hardware partners rather than in seeming symbiosis with them. Apple needs to do a lot -- a lot -- of work on its applications before it has any hope of unseating MSFT from its preeminent position in the applications space.
The interesting thing is, though, that Safari/Win has shown Apple can turn Cocoa projects into MS-Win applications just fine. Microsoft has still got some serious moat left in the applications space (installed base, format lock, and most especially absence of well-known and effective competition) but it seems the other players are working on their bridging techniques (OpenOffice continues to improve, and Apple has apparently bridged the API divide and needs "only" fix its applications so they are tolerable for serious users). The applications revenue is so big that I can't imagine Apple -- a software company -- hasn't noticed what it's sitting on.
Hmm, anyone care to guess whether Apple has got MacOS X running on an XO behind a locked door in Cupertino?
For those of you who like baseball, the littler fields used in Japan apparently make 16yo girls competitive pitchers:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/baseball/more/11/17/japan.schoolgirl.ap/index.html
Take care,
--Tex.
re top-sellers
Those top-sellers sure look mostly like discount/low-cost products. Who but Apple has a full-featured machine in the top rankings? Apple's share of revenues must be going crazy, whatever its share of unit sales.
Take care,
--Tex.
maybe that article didn't say it, but ...
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/04/negroponte_olpc_1.html
http://gizmodo.com/391054/windows-xp-on-olpc-xo-laptop-now-official
... and in case you thought maybe OLPC wouldn't ship with Microsoft's operating system ...
http://www.itworld.com/windows/57639/colombia-signs-olpc-laptops-windows
I conclude Microsoft bought placement on OLPC in order to forestall a future in which its products are irrelevant to most of the people on the planet.
Take care,
--Tex.
re OLPC
So OLPC will ship Windows, but because MacOS X has some not-open-source components, it won't allow MacOS X?
Too rich.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Same As It Ever Was
Apple definitely doesn't want to be enslaved to the demands of outsiders. On the other hand, with a commitment to Unix/POSIX and to the future of Cocoa, Apple can provide some points of consistency (e.g., in non-kernel software interfaces; and Apple is improving the consistency of kernel interfaces by developing KPIs that make implementation details irrelevant to programmers who need to use kernel extensions) without giving up on the areas in which genuine innovation is plausible.
With Cocoa and Unix/POSIX, Apple can offer some interesting things to the enterprise. Apple can support lots of enterprise applications (like all the serious database tools -- well, any serious database tools not made exclusively in Redmond), and being able to support these on its OS puts Apple in a position to compete for business it never previously could reach. The question is whether Apple wants to pursue that business, or not.
If Apple wants to be part of the back-office solutions that run whole companies -- which isn't a bad way to get related products sold all the way down the organization -- Apple might benefit from thinking about what it would want to offer enterprises, and how. If not, Apple is going to end up in enterprise only by accident, when someone takes a lot of time and trouble to set it up on an ad-hoc basis. How many System X or COLSA sales can Apple expect to make? Yet, servers back-office solutions are paid for and deployed every day, and by competing with MSFT's costly licenses Apple could take some profitable business and gain some share -- not just among installations, but minds.
Basically, Apple's disinterest in building this kind of business convinces me that it would see no value in a Sun acquisition. Apple doesn't appear to be still interested in Java (which is a great technology if you ignore the wallowing, slow UI tools with which it's been saddled), and some of the most of the cool things in Solaris are available without cost (DTrace, ZFS), so the real question is which engineers Apple should poach to help with kernel stability, performance, size, and other issues (like maybe improved KPIs, to support greater longevity of drivers by making more of what programmers need accessible to be accessible without dependence on particular implementation details).
So I stand by my "I doubt a Sun purchase" statement, but hold out some hope that Apple might make clear that experienced kernel developers and people with enterprise implementation expertise (of which Apple has considerable in-house demand, as we saw with the MobileMe rollout http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/08/apple-service-reliability-quantified.html ) should be sending applications to Apple.
Take care,
--Tex.
re Sun
ZFS was one of the technologies that I thought Apple could leverage without having to pay up for it: it can be deployed as a loadable kernel module, like other MacOS X filesystems. Apple seems to have ceded the field of storage hardware to other vendors who want to specialize in it; Apple offered Apple-branded storage only long enough to make sure there was an option, it seems, but doesn't plan to compete in a commodity business. Apple is offering SAN and other storage-related software, though ...
DTrace is already in MacOS X, incidentally.
When Apple deploys ZFS with official support, Apple will be in a position either to offer Appe-branded hardware, or allow the (cheap) hardware to be supplied by outside vendors.
Mind you, I do see some purpose in buying Sun: enterprise expertise. The question is whether Apple actually values this type of asset. Thinking not, I conclude a purchase is unlikely. However, if Apple wants to offer tech to large organizations from soup to nuts -- handheld, laptop, desktop, back-office -- Sun would not be a bad place to begin.
And over the years it's been trending cheaper ...
Take care,
--Tex.
re Sun
I grant you that Sun has some excellent engineers, some excellent enterprise talent, and some enterprise customers that don't seem able to keep the company afloat.
My question is, what could Apple get from Sun in a buyout that it can't get by poaching the people it wants? The enterprise as-is isn't $3B, it's $3B plus the ongoing cost of floating its losses. Right?
The crown of Sun -- its OS -- is now free. The filesystem is available as a loadable kernel module for MacOS.
One answer to this might be enterprise deployment expertise and an enterprise team that can actually solve enterprise issues and support enterprises. This assumes Apple thinks enterprises are a market worth chasing.
A few years ago, I'm sure you recall, I was salivating about this kind of prospect ...
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/06/on-apples-software-strategy-part-i.html
... but let's face it: Apple hasn't done much to signal that it gives a fig for enterprise.
On the other hand, innovating out of the depression may mean some interesting things for Apple. Last time, it meant emerging as a power in music. This time, it's apparently meaning gaining top billing as a phone manufacturer. Given that Apple's major software advances seem to result from acquisitions ...
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2008/06/on-apples-software-strategy-part-ii-buy.html
... maybe buying enterprise expertise is the way forward. And it's not like Apple and Sun haven't talked about hookups before:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/12/sun_apple_snapple/
I guess the question is, what has Sun got that Apple can't get either for free or by poaching the top talent with smaller money than $3B? On the other hand, if Sun's reputation in enterprise hasn't been utterly demolished by lackluster execution over the last few years, maybe the cachet of Sun and its customer list will enable Apple to do more, faster, than it would with a home-baked solution.
Has Sun even got its best talent left? Have the best swimmers already jumped ship?
Anyone know?
It's fun speculation, and definitely won't break the bank
Take care,
--Tex.
PS Sun would not be bought at market cap; when you get a control block, you end up paying a control premium. If Sun folks are proud of their work, poaching talent might be much cheaper. And remember the last conference call: buying all the engineers in the valley isn't such a bad idea, said Steve ....
OT re Voting for Pelosi
This actually raises an interesting point about our multi-tier representative democracy. Presence on, and control of, various gatekeeping subcommittees enables a minority of Congress to veto the will of the whole Congress, by killing bills before they come to the floor for a vote. Presence on these committees is based on things like the party with the most members in the chamber, the length of tenure of the members, and so on. The upshot is that the influence of a state's representative in that chamber can have enormous or trivial power, further making a mockery of the one-man-one-vote principle so many believe should guide our nation.
The party politics and chamber rules serve to make the system less representative, by concentrating power further into an insider elite.
Perhaps the solution is to create an oversight mechanism that leads to a difficult-to-game forum like a public referendum. If Congress will destroy the nation's future mortgaging it for a couple of traded votes, perhaps the public is needed to effectively halt the horse-trading -- leading to legislation that must garner public approval or die a swift death. As it is, we're drowning in legislation that isn't popular, simply because fools in Congress traded votes to get their bad law passed.
I never voted for anyone running the major committees; they were elected by a political elite selected by someone in a totally different part of the country, and they exercised a power that isn't apparent on the face of the Constitution. Yes, passing rules to govern each chamber of the legislature is granted; however, the effect is contrary to the public oversight that present communications technology renders so feasible.
The fact we piss away trillions per year on broken systems is evidence that Congress is incompetent to exercise oversight in the matter of the public fisc. Refusing to pay for anything that can't get a majority vote of the public (as opposed to the vote-trading politicos) is a possible pressure toward budgetary rationalization.
Take care,
--Tex.
re XOM's products
Unless and until XOM becomes a regulated utility, I don't see the distinction. Americans need petroleum products and can get them from Shell, BP, ExxonMobile, and others. Americans need computers and phones and can buy them from Dell, HP, Acer, Apple, and others. Americans also need software, and can buy it from Microsoft, get it free from OpenOffice or the BSD teams or the GNU folks, or buy it from Apple.
The only reason I think things like electricity have become regulated public utilities is the earlier foray of local governments into municipal trading, in which former competition was quashed in favor of a government monopoly, that proved not to be particularly efficient (surprise, surprise). When the companies were privatized, the monopoly status endured and regulation was necessary to remedy the ill caused by government intervention (to create a monopoly). Now, we have a return of competition (at least in Texas) and less need for regulation as competition offers some help in setting prices. On the other hand, as California discovered, non-regulation can lead to short-term profit maximization by bonus-focused management and a detrimental neglect of long-term capacity development -- a situation that can be remedied either with price protection (heavy-handed regulation) or tax incentives or public financing support or other techniques to reduce the cost of capital needed to support big infrastructure projects. This actually has some application to the problems facing petroleum producers, whose production capacity will be replaced only if price protection makes development cost-effective, or government applies industry-specific tricks to reduce the cost of capital for capacity development projects.
Apple is in the happy position that its capital requirements are substantially below its cash on hand, and its margins are consistently better.
If one wanted to pick an industry offering windfall profits, one might look at the margins of Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, and other companies whose revenues derive more from IP than from capital investment (yes, R&D investment is critical to keeping IP current, but it's not like a 20-year power plant development project).
If you wanted to look for something to socialize, you might consider power plant blueprints: saving the engineering costs by spreading designs across the country's new plants would both cheapen the new plants and make skills more transferrable -- to the benefit of employees, trainers, regulators, and the cost-appreciative public. A public project to design an "open source" nuclear plant might enable extremely significant cost improvements. Local customization might be needed only to ensure adequate foundations (we build on mud in Houston) and cooling (different sites will have different water sources with different access requirements).
Just a few thoughts ...
Take care,
--Tex.
OT re Big 3 as Airbus
The problem with AirBus ... has it ever made any money? Last I heard, it was behinder on its next plane than is used to be. There are too many masters, and I am concerned everyone wants it as an employer more than as a going concern, so it's a continual risk of being cash sink. (Or a massive tax break, which because it is government owned is the same thing; you cal lose revenue from a going concern by giving it tax breaks, or you can just keep refilling its accounts with cash after taxes ... haha, but you can also in a bad year do both!)
As a going concern, The Big 3 would need to be shrunk to profitability, and their value as a government holding would evaporate: no longer a big jobs machine, it would be irrelevant. As a big employer, they would need massive subsidies -- which would inure to the benefit of a minority of US citizens, becoming quickly a super-favored special interest as the companies and their union got a federal guarantee of an operating budget and a steady stream of dues. Given the market they're in, I strongly feel they should be forced to redesign to break even before they should qualify for any of my money.
I have a relative who used to threaten to move to Australia when he got worked up over government here. Maybe Australia isn't a better answer, but I can kinda see where he was coming from ....
Take care,
--Tex.
re demand crumbling
Demand is definitely down. Some of the demand will be brought back by low prices, but I reckon some of the demand is based on industrial uses that won't fire up until the construction of a rebuilding world gets moving again in a year or so.
During that time, though, Venezuelan operational incompetence (the fired the competent operators for their politics) will drive down production, Middle-Eastern sabotage will drive down production, Russian non-reinvestment will drive down production, oilfield depletion will drive down production ... in short, if new access is prohibitively expensive and prevents new sources from coming online, we should see production erosion.
Moderate changes in marginal demand/availability can have outsize impact on price. A 10% demand drop caused a 50% price drop recently, for example. Wild.
I expect oil to take a wild ride, with a long-term trend up. The infrastructure investment needed to create efficiency or alternatives is significant, and won't be made by insolvent or developing countries, so improvements in US efficiency might not move the needle much on oil pricing as the rest of the world gets revved up for growth again.
The answer seems to be to replace petroleum imports with alternatives, against the future price risk.
Take care,
--Tex.
re renewal fees and transit tolls
Taxing fuel consumption is regressive, and taxing people for commuting to work isn't?
If you want investment in low-consumption vehicles, taxing people on the value of their expensive fuel-efficiency investments every time they get their tags renewed won't be a big incentive to do it, either.
The fuel tax has the benefit of hitting exactly where it creates the incentive: at inefficiency. You can motivate people to find alternatives in varying degrees by increasing the tax on waste. People who don't want to pay the tax can use mass transit -- or demand that it be built.
Taxing "windfall" profits of petroleum producers who are being asked to spend a fortune replacing the capacity that's vanishing won't exactly motivate new investment in that direction, either.
If you're worried about the impact on the lower incomes, there are ways to back out the cost of the tax: credits on the income tax, for example, and modifications to the withholding formulas to keep that income in the households all year long. Blaming petroleum producers isn't productive. Directly incentivizing efficiency and alternatives through a tax to fund those projects seems like a clear option.
Ahh, well. I've supported fuel taxes for energy policy reasons for some time, and I have little confidence our current politicians have the fortitude to do it.
Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.
Take care,
--Tex.