jbelkin

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    • Fri Aug 22nd 12:31 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Nokia Gets No Respect Against Apple, RIM
      The problem is that a year ago, everyone dismissed Apple & the iPhone as a newcomer who would NEVER get any traction against the big boys - guess what - the big boys have been asleep at the switch for YEARS and what has been the response? our next phone will be better - they are what now, 3? 4? generations behind the iPhone - the Instinct the collective brainpower of Samsung or Nokia stll touting features and claiming they have the best camera? Remember they claimed the iphone would never gain any traction because people didn't want to use a touchscreen (or browse the mobile web?) - yea, THEIR mobile web or their touchscreen. That's why Nokia is ignored, for ALL their supposed prowess, as you yourself noted, phone portion & camera is fine but the rest - not much of a smartphone. The facts are the other comapnies are too laden where the project manager cannot override engineering or marketing to say this feature is crap - do it again - that's the bottom line. It's not that they don't have the brainpower, they cannot bring it to market ... nor the attention to detail (just look at the Instinct's icons - some are 2D, some are 1D and some are 3D in appearance - if you cannot even create cohesive icons, how else can you take on the iPhone) ... and NOW the app store - suddenly Nokia is all about an app store ... much like the music store? No ... basically, Apple will take about 70% of the HIGH MARGIN smartphone market, RIM will hold onto to about 15% and the other 3 /4 will fight over the remaining 15%. They are all fine on creating/adding features but as a cohesive gadget, they'd had 15 years and all have failed REPEATEDLY ... because they cannot get their act together on the UI, on creating an app store and of course, creating the Apple mystic.
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    • Tue Feb 19th 12:59 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Apple's AT&T Deal Is Costly
      For a guy who claims to be a numbers guy, you don't do much calculating yourself.

      Apple is selling an EXTRA 400,000 or 1+ million phones where other cell phone manufacturers might sell a few thousand more ... that's right - not on the network but still buying ...

      This would be a problem if Apple was subsidizing each phone sale but it's NOT- every one at FULL PRICE 100% of the time.

      As for people who can't/won't switch to AT&T ... how much does AT&T make for this customer? That's right - ZERO.

      How much does Apple make? That's right $400 to $500 DOLLARS!

      Versus ZERO.

      It's ALL found money. Even better, Apple has to provider ZERO tech support - how much savings is that?

      And with everyone that goes overseas that's not "legal," that just adds to the cachet of the product. How many products are considered FREE ADVERTISING & MARKETING for a company yet they made $450 TODAY?! Not to mention every Iphone sale is potential iTunes sales (even overseas ones either have stores or if they have a US credit card can buy tracks & movies) ...

      By your math, since everyone on this planet doesn't have an iPhone, that's a trillion loss?

      So you prefer possible future monthly revenue versus a $450 sale today? The future monthly stream is never guaranteed even if you sign up a carrier - people drop out, people don't pay ... but you don;'t factor that in because it's too hard?

      The real world is more complex than just A+B-C ... or perhaps you should stick to analysing industries that aren't so complex.
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    • Wed Jul 11th 02:42 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Microsoft Scared of iPhone Domination
      this isn't about who is or who isn't evil - after all both are for profit companies. The main difference is Microsoft tries to surround the market so you have no choice but them - except in the age of the internet, it's a non-starter strategy. Apple on the other hand simply decides what they want to do, if you want to use their products, this is our choice of a 'standard,' good or bad we don't care what you think, we picked on for whatever reason, you should trust us - if you don't, that's fine - we don't care - that is how they see LInux, Firefox or Flash. We are not going to publically attack them, we simply dismiss them as un-interesting or unworthy of our mention.

      A separate issue is this again proves how inept MS is now - along with the billion dollar XBox writeoff. MS shareholders are suckers and idiots for not caring that the XBox has cost them a minimal $18 BILLION dollars loss in revenue and at least that in equity - even presuming they invested it with zero returns versus massive losses.
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    • Mon Jul 9th 17:10 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Was Verizon Really Wrong To Pass On The iPhone?
      Verizon's bigger problem is CDMA.
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    • Mon Jul 2nd 22:22 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      iPhone Mania: Case Study of the Better Mousetrap Principle
      From a month ago, these guys covered that exact same thought:

      2aday.wordpress.com/20.../
      View article »
    • Tue May 15th 13:13 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The iPhone: Apple's First Flop
      First all, people pay the same for a two year contract now for a phone costing $49 so the only question is whether you would pay $499 or $599 for a phone - you might not want to or can't afford to - that's fine but can you honestly all your purchasing decisions are reflected in the general population? I've spent $600 on a dinner, in college, I'm sure that was my entire budget for dinners so what's $600 for a phone I can use for 2 years, it all depends on what you make and whether you're interested. And when you define mass market, what exactly do you mean, there are some 220 million phones in the US, are you saying anything less than 70 million is a failure or that unlike other phone manufacturers, the iphone is full price only? So, even 1 million by $600 is a pretty huge number? You really have to get over that just because you can't afford something or don't want it, no one else will.
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    • Tue May 15th 13:04 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Free Video Downloads Will Overtake iTunes Soon -- Study
      2aday.wordpress.com/20.../
      View article »
    • Thu Apr 26th 01:06 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Five Reasons Why Apple's iPhone is Better Than the Rest
      Yes, we don't know 100% of what the iphone will be or won't be BUT we do what the competition has offered after 20 years and a couple BILLION phones - THEY HAVE FAILED. I have used about 10-20 phones in my life and yet to find one where everything important pretty much worked as it should. OSX is not perfect but its' quirks are pretty minor. Conversely, I have yet to use that could do all the simple things correctly that a phone should in making my life easier ... or they program it idiotically. Why is it my $300 phone can jostle in my pocket and change from RING to VIRBRATE or I look in my photos to see that it took 6 photos of the insides of my pocket (all black - no light) - how dumb is that? Or that I have to manually change theclock on phone - doesn't the freakin' thing have to check into the network like every millisecond? My VCR can find the right time, my cell phone can't? I have no idea if the iphone will be brilliant or great or even just pretty good. All I know is Nokia, samsung, moto, Sony, LG, Erickson and many others have been trying and failing for 20 years to produce anything that 90% of people would go - it's got a great UI! And not dumb at all to figure out if my contact has 6 numbers, of course, he gets 6 listings - who doesn't love to call fax numbers! They had a million shots and they blew them all. From the video I've seen, they will look like morons in July 2007 ... especially Verizon.
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    • Tue Apr 24th 12:23 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Apple: Subscription Music Service Seems Inevitable
      You could plug any numbers into a spreadsheet and make a case for anything but Americans have proven through their actions of the last 4 years they are not interested. Sure, there are 2 million people interested and for them, they are served by 3-4 different companies and their service. But no matter who enters and no matter how low of a price they offer (like Yahoo's $7.99), people are just not that interested in paying to play DJ for music they like enough to listen but NOT to own. It's just too much work - We're NOT interested. How much more proof do people need? Just like satellite radio - people are only so interested in paying for radio but at least with satellite, all you have to turn on the station, you don't have to assemble it yourself. The music industry wants a lot of things - Apple as you might've heard makes their own decisions on many things - especially avoiding businesses that clearly have no upside. It's fine for small timers like SanDisk or Real but not a real growth business.

      As for the cell companies, they've been touting a billion mp3 player phones sold for YEARS and where has it gotten them? Nowhere. It's their own doing a) GREED. The first track you buy from the Sprint store either costs you $2.59 or $15.99 (as a "advanced" services customer). People are not morons. I can get a higher quality of that song by buying a CD or just downloading it illegally - why would I want Sprint? Same with other coampnies and B) phones are disposable thanks to their selling processes so unlike the ipod where people tend to think of it as friend, a phone is a fair weathered friend until the next comes along - months or 7 months from now. Along with that is their intrinsic value of ZERO - there's no cachet to owning a phone - it'd be like waving junk mail around going, I got mail! Having an ipod proves you can afford the best so until the phone companies & manufacturers stop giving away their branding - a phone means nothing.
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    • Fri Apr 20th 23:25 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Why is Apple Restricting Third-Party iPhone Apps?
      Whatever the reason, the no third party apps seems to send people into a tizzy - why? Sales of smartphone PDA's are not exactly setting the world on fire - if anything sales are trending downward so being able to load 3rd party apps is clearly not driving the smartphone PDA market.

      Then when you look at what people are adding - it's PRODUCTIVITY & UTILITY apps to replace the crappy productivity and utility apps - what's the point again? Touting that you can add a third SYNC software is really not saying much of anything.

      Sure, there are apps for in-field inventory, prescription medication DB or forest logging but does Apple really compatbility with those apps to drive sales. Do any of those apps work with 99% of cellphones - no. Clearly the much, much bigger market is the "general" user - if you can read emails, look at phones, play music, video and snap a few pictures AND you can surf the web - what can't you do on the web now? What more do you need? Do you really need a 3rd party Adobe Reader when Preview works better? Do you need to a $39 Excel spreadsheet viewer when you can use a web page?

      People sometimes only can see the 2 feet in front of them and parrot whatever they've always parroted but like the Mac or the ipod, be careful of sounding like Steve Ballmer who is clueless about anything not in the past.
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    • Mon Apr 2nd 13:48 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Steve Jobs Figures Dealmaking, Dollars Have Killed DRM
      Any loss sales of the iPod is balanced by extra sales now that people don't feel they are "locked" in. Let's face it - the vast majority of itunes store shoppers could care less - they liked the convenience of clicking once and it would buy, load and sync. But also keep in mind, that was not a lot of people, the average purchase is less than 10 per ipod - were the more savvy purchasers "holding back" because of DRM and/or lower sound quality (there's lots og blog entries about this but of course, that's anecdotal) so will this push them over the purchasing category? It can't hurt - but the most important thing to keep in mind is that Apple makes very little on itunes store urchases - maybe a net of a couple pennies (previously) so every bit is nice but not crucial to Apple - the over risding of ipod purchasers lived fine with not a lot of itunes music tracks and Apple's revenues are still substantial without it - Apple does NOT sell ipods at a loss hoping to sell you more "blades." It's an extra bonus if many more itunes tracks are purchased. Plus, while others will come on board - Apple, of course, gets the initial PR and of course, gets the extra branding when OTHER mp3's players add the extra feature line (compatible with itunes music store tracks)
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    • Mon Apr 2nd 00:55 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Waiting Until AppleTV Flops to Buy Apple Stock
      Whether you thought the ipod was going to be a success or not 5 years ago, you also had to factor in that Apple had toi built up an entire eco system to sell the thing - from creating itunes to hardware research to then building a store ... AND sell in the consumer electronics marketplace. I trust even you can rest assured that any big hiccups have been resolved.

      What exactly did the AppleTv require? It's essentially a Apple mac mini with less feature, HD outputs and a small hard drive - the essentially software is already up & running on all macs (front Row & itunes). The itunes storefront is already built. Essentially AppleTV is a big ipod for your TV running parts of OSX - not exactly new territory for Apple.

      Apple sells everything (hardware wise) with about 27-35% margin and there's barely anything new on the AppleTV so you can presume the same here - Apple doesn't sell anything at a loss so what is Apple really out? AppleTv doesn't have to be ipod successful because Apple already spent most of the money to build the backend - AppleTv is essentially TIDE BLUE for activewear.

      Remember people do not buy for features - they buy for convenience at the right price.
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    • Sun Mar 25th 00:42 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Apple For Enterprise: Yes, Change Does Happen
      First, you are absolutely right about the seemingly ingrained belief that 'history repeats itself or things don't change' - then when they do, boy do those people jump off the bandwagon. The ipod thing is a perfect example. For the first four years of the ipod, most analysts seem to think it was just a fad and that MS could snap their fingers and take over the market - that it was a replay of the netscape/GUI interface fight without examining that it was a whole new world and that in the internet world - the old rules no longer applied - they have finally come around though of course, hardly anyone admits their poor earlier conclusions.

      With that said, there is one philsophical/company culture difference - MS is built to sell in bulk and focused on decision makers in enterprise. They could care less about ease of use for end users - just like decision maker buyers don't care if Office is bloated - as long as it's within their price range and offers the 500 checkpoints they want - does anyone really need 150 starbursts in powerpoint with 100 of those choices dead horse ugly? It's the largest check on the checklist when compared to the competition. And virus and malware - of little consequence to the CAPITAL budget buyer - since maintanence or IT comes out of another budget - not his responsibility. And of MS is eager to please, they'll do whatever it takes to get the sale or in the 1990's buy up the competition and merge it into their app so it's another checklist item and/or more importantly - eliminating another incompatible choice - look at of MS' attempts at creating "standards" that are not standards or a couple weeks ago when they tried to come up with a new format that was "better" than jpeg - like anyone cares.

      But in the case of enterprise, part of Apple's non-success is just a different company culture. MS is eager to please by incorporating anything anyone wants into anything as long as you're willing to pay for it and they'll be happy to talk about what's coming next because they want to sell you what you want. Apple is different in that they'll pretty decide what they consider useful or unimportant and if they say no, that's it. So, in one sense MS is better at customer service but the downside is MS will put in 105 things from 75 different requests because they only care about getting the sale so everything is stuffed to the gills and NOTHING is left out out of the code. That looks good on the checklist but to the user? - ugh. So Apple appears aloof or arrogant to enterprise because they say nothing and simply say, "when we're ready, we'll show you."

      10 years ago, it was an MS world but now, it's an Apple world because consumers and small cadres drive technology forward - and that's where Apple shines - we love a good surprise and while we say we want things, we don't necessaeily mean it (otherwise we'd be eating sensibly and execercising) - that's why MS is totally confused. They ask people what they want or they come up things that have a longer checklist but people don't buy while Apple doesn't ask anyone - they just unveil things.

      So, it's not likely to change much as Apple is not going to hire thousands of sales reps to pound the pavement nor will they offer much guidance beyond what you can guess what Intel is doing ... Apple will gain more shares but not massive shares but that's okay - when you can generate 60% of MS' revenue with 4-5% marketshare of PC's - imagine what 10-14% will deliver.

      The 1990's were to MS what the 1950's were to GM.

      They still haven't a clue as Steve Ballmer keeps talking about overtaking Google in months ...
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    • Thu Mar 15th 15:12 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Could a Dell/Apple Partnership Work?
      As long as Steve Jobs is running Apple, the chances are NIL. Steve Jobs remembers every comment and holds a grudge. If Apple ever decided to launch a licensing program, Dell would so far down the list - right below Coleco, Zenith & Packard Bell. Mike Dell is a good sales guy but has no clue about anything else - he ticked off the wrong company & Steve Jobs just to get a laugh. For everyone else, remember this about speaking ill of anyone - it might come back to bite you big time. Dell had its time in the Sun, like every other commodity Pc maker, as soon as your overhead goes up, you're done like Zenith, emachines, packard bell, all #1 in PC sales - all dead. Dell looks to be another dead man walking - as they have failed in EVERY venture outside of selling $300 Pc's - from consulting to servers to routers to consumer electronics - as if the world is holding its breath for a Dell phone.
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    • Sat Feb 24th 16:56 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      How Apple’s iPhone Could Flop
      All those things that guy rants about is POTENTIALLY true of anything that requires a long term commitment from getting a mortage to leasing a car or to Hollywood actors, like getting married.

      The iphone is not a kidney dialysis machine (at least not yet :-) It is a buying choice like everything else from day old bread to a Bentley. You can choose to buy according to your needs but it's another choice - not sure why other than people who work at Apple' competitors, it "inspires/unleash... such rage.

      Cingular service - so, this guy really believes if Apple got no revenue from new iphone customers, Cingular/AT&T was/is going to plow that money towards customer service or would they simply get bigger shrimp at the executive retreat?

      A two year cell phone contract - not exactly everyone's first choice but who here not in prison thinks 2 years doesn't fly by in a twink of an eye - how much free time does this guy have that 2 years seems intermable? Okay, if you feel that way, DON'T BUY AN IPHONE or ANY CONTRACT PHONE - you can buy pre paid. It's not like it's a trick contract where it's month to month but if you're late with a payment, it gets converted to two years. It says right there on the front of the webiste - TWO YEAR blah, blah, blah - it's plain right there. If you disagree, don't buy it.

      Can't Install Apps - Smartphones have a 3% marketshare now and really, what apps are most people installing? My evidence is only limited to about 30 people but as far as I tell from my friends and colleagues, not only have they only installed at most a few apps at most but in virtually all the cases - it's simply BETTER versions of what's included so until we see Apple' apps, we don't know what else there is. It is like Apple's MAIL, it's not a perfect app but it's pretty nice. No real need for me to buy another MAIL app. Of course, Outlook support is important but you really think if MS offered an Outlook for the iphone, Apple wouldn't let them sell you one? I presume the web surfer is a mini Safari - do I really need to load another browser? As for the other necessary utilities like notes, calendar, address book, etc, I can't imagine Apple not providing a state of the art version - what else? Being able to read PDF's and Office formats? Beyond that, what else are you looking to load? Sure, it sounds like it's a feature we want but look at the ipod, without you being to load other apps, we have games, we have ebooks, we have transit maps, we have drink mixes and we the Constitution ... it's like choosing between a 6-speed and an 8-speed transmission for a 4-door sedan, why exactly do you need an 8-speed transmission? But AGAIN, NOT hidden from you - NOT a surprise. They announced right up front - if it's not for you, it's not for you.

      And in closing, he's saying - only he is smart enough to read the giant typeface on the FRONT PAGE of the website and he's telling us that a 2 YEAR CONTRACT means a 2 year contract and no third party apps means no third party apps and he's saying that AT&T would've taken the millions they are giving to Apple to plow right back into customer service so by buying an iphone, that money will only go to Apple who is probably going to waste it on R&D or having Jonathan Ive devise a shrimp the size of the Cisco iphone.

      So, remember, don't read what's plainly written when you can read his words.
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