Yagottabe Kidding

Does CEO Age Affect Stock Performance?

Now graph college degree and performance. Or location and performance. Or sex and performance. Or...you know... CEO experience and performance.

Oh!

Wait!

That sample population above was hand picked!

Oh good grief.

Nevermind.

Next!

Weekly Shorts Review: Garmin, TomTom, Nintendo, Palm

Nokia isn't going to pay billions of dollars for Palm.

No one is.

It's WELL past time to put this silliness to rest.

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A few years ago when Palm actually had some pretty good-selling devices, like the Centro and Treos (planned or out), Palm's BoD decided the BEST future for Palm was to sell the company.

And they could not even though they had hundreds of millions in cash, no debt, and said devices. [this is all revealed in Palm's SEC documentation about the original Elevation Partners transaction]

NOW Palm is heavily in debt, has massively more shares outstanding, has Preferred Shares that have priority over common, and have a weak product that apparently didn't even live up to expectations.

And the stock price suggests billions upon billions of dollars to buy it out.

Why does ANYONE reasonably think any company would NOW be insane enough to buy Palm anywhere near the current price if they weren't insane enough to buy it really cheaper a couple years ago?

Poor IT Management Goes Mainstream

I hope the real story behind this data loss comes out. In this day of fully-redundant RAID arrays it's kind of hard to lose data unless you wipe the data programmatically.

Android, iPhone Ride Rising Tide

How is "marketshare" computed? Do those who calculate "marketshare" rely on sell-through numbers from the various manufacturers? If not, how else do they get (number of units sold by manyfacturer X)/total units by everyone)?

Now that we know Palm reports "sell-through" numbers that INCLUDE sales by their main (Pre) distributor, Sprint, to retailers (and, quite likely, even sales to distributors - those who sell to retailers )- that is, NOT end-consumers and NOT part of any "marketshare" - how is their marketshare number computed?

Does Palm's Pre Have Anything on the iPhone or Storm?

The "problem" with the Pre is it's not right for a celebrity to use two hands - they have to be holding the Pre up to their ear while glancing to the side at someone with a crinkled-nose smile while waving cutely with the other hand. If they do that with the Pre you don't even SEE it.

Did you see that Microsoft set of tweets that just happened and is being "reported" around by the Engadgets of the World? "Hold off on getting an iPhone/Pre" Yikes!

Smartphone Update: 2008 Q4 Market Share

> ...As HTML5-based applications begin to permeate the
> mobile space...

Those do not hold a candle to native applications and developers understandably are WAY leery of an environment that reveals their source code to all.

It is doubtful there is a huge market for cloud-based applications that allow hiding one's source on a server "out there".

Message to Microsoft: Buy Palm, Forget Yahoo

$2 billion dollasr for a User Interface that runs on Linux and several hundred more to get it to run somewhere else!?

Oh yeah, Microsoft is gonna do that, alrightee!

Good grief.

Don't Close the Line on Nokia Just Yet

Let's try those two Engadget links again:

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Here's Engadget non-mobile, then mobile, for example:

engadget.com

mobile.engadget.com

Sorry about that.

Don't Close the Line on Nokia Just Yet

Admob gathers statistics on MOBILE web site traffic, not regular web site traffic (mobile web sites are those with drastically reduced content - often JUST text, that fit "better" on small phone screens as well as using considerably less data transfer). Here's Engadget non-mobile, then mobile, for example:

www.endgadget.com

mobile.engadget.com/

Furthermore, Admob gathers statistics ONLY for those mobile web sites carrying Admob's ads.

Thus you're talking a small percentage of a small percentage of actual phone web site browsing from which statistics are being gathered.

The iPhone, for example, is known for its good web browsing capability. THAT phone would be visiting NONmobile web sites while a reduced-capability phone like, say, the RAZR would be visiting MOBILE web sites.

So drawing ANY general conclusion about phones from Admob's statistics is simply wrong.

Period.

MSFT Now Has More Leverage Than Ever Before

Everyone - and by that I mean everyone in the Me-Too Media a Blogiverse - seems to be totally looking at this in the Microsoft-perspective way. I've literally seen NO articles/posts that discuss this from a Yahoo-perspective manner; absolutely EVERY single article/blog suggests that Yahoo made a serious serious mistake without even beginning to try to THOROUGHLY describe the Yahoo POV (for example, almost NO articles/blogs mention that this was not to be a totally-cash deal and that MSFT-the-stock was worth les than wehn it all began - this seems to be an outrageously important piece of information yet it's essentially totally ignored by all).