Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

AAPL's business model

Back closer to the Board's topic, I note that the Univ. of Virginia incoming student survey may not be a fluke, but is arguably a leading indicator:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/26/morgan_stanley_40_of_college_students_plan_to_buy_macs.html

If Morgan Stanley is right, student demand for university computing resources will turn toward Macs, Mac support infrastructure will improve at universities, and this will mean universities will be churning out grads with a background in managing Macs in enterprise environments (backups, deployments, upgrades, user management, etc.). Apple could be pulling on MS-Windows what MSFT did with NT in the '90s.

Back to Unix, anyone?

It's not a short road, but it's a movement that builds momentum. Since MSFT's business model is in selling software, it's unclear how MSFT could make a case on the point of price without doing what MSFT had to do in some european government contracts, and simply buy the deals. If MSFT ended up subsidizing the hardware to keep students being trained to support MSFT's products, MSFT might stem the tide, but there's a marketing cost to getting caught at this.

If the 40% number is right, and it's consistent, this is a wave that will look awesome as it nears to shoreline.

Take care,
--Tex.

PS if ADBE's "we can use it" clause applies only to stuff published for public viewing, it would be unlikely to impact even pro users, of the product were a good substitute for ADBE's pro image manipulation tools. The question then becomes, must one pay for non-public storage, etc. Still, I don't see ADBE hawking people's pics; I think this language is intended to cover anything ADBE does to create web revenues on the basis of the stuff people do mark public (e.g., advertising, etc.). I think ADBE wants the ad revenue, it doesn't want to be AdSense, paying content people for ad revenues -- ADBE wants to stand in the shoes of the content creator to benefit from whatever revenue stream marketers dream up down the road.