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Quest for the Droid Crowds: Not So Epic

iPhone developer tools and support is well thought through from beginning the project to selling the app, whereas he Android is old school code. The iPhone SDK is complete and flawlessly executed to produce apps quickly with testing that weeds out clunky problems, no detail is overlooked. I could brainstorm, code, market and sell 20 iPhone apps for the time to do one Android app and the market for that one iPhone app is 100x what an Android app is. Frankly, without some extra seed money to develop Android, it isn't worth it. Simple economics, Android will be a second tier product for most developers, and will miss out on the most innovative apps.

China in a Bubble?

Really, this is an important topic but this article is just plain wrong on almost all counts. Common sense will point you to the facts that China will have a stable supply limited commodity market. This has the support of a government liquid with trillions of U.S. treasury bonds. Peasants stock piling enough copper to disrupt markets? What are you smoking anyway :) China's internal demand is outstripping their capacity for supply in almost every sector. That's why they are being so aggressive to strike partnerships with Brazil, Africa, anywhere else that is strategic. And major projects such as their nationwide high speed rail system (costing $800 Billion dollars) will have the commodity supply side pegged for a decade. This will consume several years of all the steel produced in the world! Read the Financial times series on this. Yes, this is government stimulus, but they have the money, no debt, and when all is said and done China will have built an infrastructure that will fuel growth for coming decades. Real Estate is another matter. The government puts up with speculation and insider profits in order to have an engine for their urbanization policies. But a bubble? on what terms are you basing this on? Real estate ownership is possible for the lowest wage earner and there are aggressive policies from renters on up. The major objective is to move people from the country to urban areas where they can contribute to the economy. This strategy is working very well for China, this heavily supported policy is not a bubble and will not, as a whole, produce the across the board market failure experienced in the rest of the world.

You've Got GM, President Obama: Build Natural Gas Vehicles

Using natural gas for cars is a no brainer. It just hasn't gotten any mindshare. The technology to make these cars is trivial, and fleets or them have been running since the gas crunch of the 1970's. They are a better bet in many, many ways compared to all electric cars. We can build these NOW. It is also (relatively) easy to convert large pick-up to natural gas, which some in the west have done for years. Vehicles running natural gas produce a tenth of the pollution and have triple the engine life, because natural gas doesn't wash the lubrication off the engine like petroleum.

Honda sold a natural gas car with a home filling appliance called "Phill" that would hang on the wall of your garage. When you get home you plug you car into it and it fills the car from your home natural gas line. This is the cheapest way to run a car ever devised. But it is all but unknown, natural gas vehicles are all but invisible. They are never promoted because of the few refueling stations, but the reality is, compared to full electric, there is a lot of refueling infrastructure and the technology is dead simple and well proven.

You don't see natural gas vehicles in Europe because Europe doesn't have any natural gas. They do have diesel thanks to the heavy north sea crude oil.

Every car rolling of the production line should be by law either e85 capable or natural gas. Whether you use it or not, e85 lets an engine burn most any mixture of gas and alcohol from mostly alcohol to mostly gas. Adding the e85 feature would only add $25 to the cost of the vehicle and would provide a lot of fuel flexibility for the life of the car. Between these two things - and they are both easy, low technology, cheap to implement solutions - we could take the pressure off of petroleum use very quickly. While full electric cars are the goal, car makers could be adding these features NOW, while we ramp up electric car technologies and bring down the costs. Batteries for electric cars are still crazy expensive - which is why the Chevy Volt is going to cost around $40,000. Unfortunately, that price limits the number of people jumping into a new and unproven technology. We need a transition technology which is not petroleum dependent; natural gas and e85 are cheap and proven; everything that is not an electric vehicle should have this capability.

Pressure Builds at Microsoft

MS would be far better of cutting off some of the bleeding in its many poorly managed divisions. MS had to recognize, especially in this economy, they don't have to be in every market.

Example that come to mind are Zune (never going to break through in sales), MSN (very poorly run and bleeds money), their music store, etc etc. They have a rags den of business that are losing money.

Really, the only reliable cash cow is the Windows OS, and they make money even if they sell a piece of garbage like Vista. So they should get rid of the failing busnesses that are just distracting their focus and milk the OS business for all its worth, while they still can. The gravy train won't be there forever, and they are blowing it by being so unfocused and distracted.

IBM Drops Two Bombs on Microsoft

Its pretty common knowledge to most folk in SV that Google's next step is a Linux distribution that uses their Chrome browser as the user interface, and of course ties into their cloud based services for office applications.

This provides the fuctionality of windows + office, and, it will be (of course) FREE.

I would guess that Google will probably produce it as both a thin client version and a traditional OS version. This OS completes their capture of the entire food chain; it's the only missing piece. It explains a lot of the engineering Google put into Chrome, multi threaded java, etc.

THIS will be the death of the windows seat tax for corporate users. Whether a corporation has 5 or 500,000 seats to pay for, the price of "free" looks pretty good.

Apple Hopes That "Rock" Will Restore Its Roll

Practically no company on earth has the consistent growth and profitability that Apple has shown over the last 5 years.

That the stock is down when the rest of the market is soaring boils down to one thing: stock manipulation.

Apple is a great company but the stock manipulation kills it for the average investor.

A Microsoft Break-Up Could Unlock Its True Value - Barron's

Xbox is a money loser. The box is sold at a huge loss, and reliability is so bad MS has replaced some customers boxes 3 or 4 times. Game sales still haven't caught up with the razor/razor blades model they are using.

The online division has and will always lose vast amounts of cash.

Zune has been massively costly.

The office productivity software is profitable but will see massive erosion now that there are other viable options. Many but customers have moved on.

The OS business is the only thing that makes, or rather, prints money. The huge revenue and high margins are the classic software product. It is not a great OS but it's base is huge and has a very long tale, the shift to another platform (like Apple) will take a decade or more.

MS would do well to unload all these losers so they can focus on straightening out the Vista mess, because OS and Office sales are the only thing they make real money on.

Buying Yahoo would be the worst thing for both companies, though Yahoo stock would benefit,

Apple's Leap from Mediocre to Marvelous

This article show a thin understanding about iPod and what Apple did differently to make it happen.

1. Every survey and focus group said the iPod was too expensive, Apple went ahead with it because they believed in the product.

2. The iPod wasn't designed to conquer the world. When it was released there wasn't even a windows version offered, and then without iTube, Windows itunes and the Music store came much later.

3. Marketing wasn't a factor in its initial success. In fact, Apple barely promoted it. It was an Apple only product, expensive, and sold in low quantities to early adopters.

4. The iPod was (and is) profoundly more advanced than competing mp3 players. The early use of a hard drive combined with solid state memory gave great performance and storage capacity. But more than anything Apple's ground breaking interface allowed huge music libraries to be quickly navigated. The user experience was heads and shoulders above the competition.

5. Apple understood the importance of an ecosystem, and built the iTunes music store to make browsing for music fun and incredibly easy. Buying music on other stores was a huge pain. But most importanly, Apple broke the digital log jam by getting the major labels to agree to digital distribution. We take this for granted now. but that was an earth shaking accomplishment when it happened.

Sales? Apple is certainly competent in sales and marketing, but is biggest asset is it willingness to make gutsey decisions, For example, opening Apple stores was greeted with derision by all the pundits, but are responsible more than anything for Apple's breakthrough success (from a sales and marketing context) than any other factor.

'Best of Breed' Business Model a Chink in Apple’s Armor?

Let me get this straight: you're waiting to buy a laptop that isn't out yet, you've never seen a review on, that you don't know the price of (probably the same or more), and that runs Microsoft Vista that "might" be fixed with the next service pack? And your choosing that instead of running a slick, well reviewed piece of sweet engineering (Mac OS X) that you could buy this afternoon (Macbook Air)? This is like buying shoes that don't fit; not a good deal no matter how little you pay.

'Best of Breed' Business Model a Chink in Apple’s Armor?

You should look at the big picture. Macs are the best and will only get better with the upcoming super-stable and fast "snow leopard" version of OS X. Meanwhile, Microsoft is struggling to get service packs out for Vista. Apple is building a next generation ecosystem that will make dekstops, mobiles and cloud services work together seamlessly. After struggling with a Dell laptop I finally had to roll back to XP to get the thing to run right. That's an 8 year old operating system. When it crashed I took over my wife's old Mac Powerbook, upgraded to Leopard, and couldn't be happier. As a life long MS user I never would have believed I could love an operating system, but i do. The Mac OS X is amazing, and possibly life changing. I encourage you to borrow one for a week and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Apple's Stuck in the 180s: What Can Push Shares Higher?

In three months things will be all too clear.

- iPhone roll out in 70 countries, along with the launch of iPhone app store.
- China and Russia are likely to be onboard by then as well.
- macbook and macbook pro get long overdue replacements in Sept., which will result in exploding pre-school sales
- iMac still booking record sales at 46% year over year growth
- iPhone SDK will fuel development for Mac and Apple TV as well
- Expect more future product innovations such as an iPhone based micro laptop.