Apple: Why Is The 'Cult' Of Mac So Misunderstood? [View article]
The Ugly Truth has hit a home run again.
These so-called 'expert financial analysts' who dish outrageously ill-informed opinions about Apple's supposed 'problems' are nothing more than haruspices, snakeoil merchants peddling their 'insights' to part fools from their money.
No company is perfect, every company faces problems, nobody is immune from competitive threats, but after 30 years at the plough, Apple's got pretty damn good at what it does and it's most unlikely a guy in an expensive suit sitting at a desk in an ivory tower is going to figure something out the company hasn't already thought about.
I remember Sibelius' comment when someone told him 'The critics are not going to like your latest symphony.'
'Critics!?' he exploded, 'Critics? Whoever erected a statue to a critic?'
Steve Ballmer refuses to dismiss the possibility of a Microsoft (MSFT) smartphone down the line, even as his company shoots down rumors about near-term plans. Ballmer also tells channel partners Microsoft will stick to selling its Surface tablet through its own site and company stores, and makes clear whom it now considers to be public enemy #1. "We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple." (earlier) [View news story]
Ballmer is ultra reliable: he gets it wrong all the time.
Microsoft's major threat is Google, not Apple.
He needs to be let out to pasture. Under his tenure the value of the company he inherited has not achieved its potential by a long chalk.
Apple: Take Profits Before You Lose Them [View article]
@ dab3z
And that's only a part of the story. Many households have several Apple products.
There will always be people who will never buy Apple. That's choice at work in the market.
If you want to get a good view of how Apple is doing, just walk by any Apple Store anywhere in the world. If it's not humming I'll eat my hat. Nobody's forcing people into the store, nobody is forcing them to take money out to buy. That's choice at work in the market. Denying this is real doesn't change a thing.
Consistency is, of course, a key ingredient for long term success. Without that, a company goes from one thing to another, sometimes getting it right hopefully, other times scoring a big zero. If the zeros outweigh the hits, the company eventually fails
Along with consistency, another key aspect is the willingness to stick at it, through all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Now, here comes the rub. If you are both consistent and you stick at it, you CAN win.... BUT the objective has to be right, because if it's not, you consistently aim at the wrong thing and you stick at it no matter what, even if it's driving you into the ground.
And that's the huge difference between how Steve Jobs thought about things and how Steve Ballmer thinks about things. Jobs vision was to build beautiful things that enhanced a person's life and to do that as well as he knew how. He'd embrace something with enthusiasm but drop it if he came to realize it was off track, and on the other hand he'd just keep hammering away at something that couldn't be made to work until it could be made to work. The products to him were the delivery mechanism for the vision.
Ballmer's vision, on the other hand, is even simpler. He loves Microsoft, passionately. He says so every time he opens his mouth. In his eyes the company can do no wrong and - more - it can achieve anything it sets its mind to. Unfortunately, his vision is 'Windows everywhere'. That's it. The product, in other words, IS the vision.
You can't tell Ballmer Windows isn't going to be everywhere, that it's done, time to move on. That it's time to direct all the skills that built the Windows empire onto a new set of objectives. That's where consistency and sticking at it can kill you.
Android, of course, has never 'outsold' iOS. It's free for anyone to use. That's the only reason the mass of cheap smartphones come with some flavour or other of Android. The key metric is: who is making the profit? Apple takes more profit from the smartphone sector than ALL the Android device makers put together.
By the way, there is nothing secure about the way the Android emulator is 'embedded' on QNX. That is an invention born perhaps from wishful thinking. A basic understanding of how the emulator is implemented would reveal this self-evident fact.
RIM expresses the view the 'chaotic cesspool' of the general Android environment will damage the RIM brand. No surprises there. Obvious from the start, really.
So RIM is now forced to retrace its steps and implement a RIM-specific mechanism whereby customers can download Android apps. This will involve curation of all apps deemed suitable for RIM. This is a non trivial task, as RIM will discover. It requires a carefully thought out technical, administrative and accounting strategy and a well executed implementation.
Bravo! The penny has dropped. Curation is mandatory for a secure environment. Precisely the point Apple has been making all along, and a key component of the iOS AppStore from Day 1. Of course, there's a lot more to the issue, but this will be a good start for RIM.
Thursday's Earnings (3/29/12) Will Be Huge For RIM [View article]
I'd be very surprised if there is any chance Apple is remotely interested in buying RIM.
It's hard to see what the company has to offer Apple, other than a bundle of management headaches and potentially damaging patent actions from Kodak and others that it can well do without.
RIM's Jewel in the Crown, its BES email and messaging security, has been left behind by Apple's comprehensive data and messaging security infrastructure. Apple is fully certified to carry SECRET level data and communications by Australia's security services, who are partners with the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA in a worldwide structure. Expect certification to occur with all the partners. There's nothing for Apple to learn from BES.
Apple already owns the patents it bought jointly with RIM, and my guess is there's nothing else of significance in RIM's portfolio that Apple needs. Apple seems to be doing just fine with its own technologies.
In terms of 'burying' RIM, there's no need for Apple to do anything other than continue to provide its own product line. Customers will decide what to buy using their common sense and, incidentally, their own money.
The key asset in RIM that could attract a buyer is the BlackBerry brand. Brands with worldwide recognition are expensive to build. A no-name me-too brand in China or India, trying to step past Samsung onto the world stage could find BlackBerry an attractive buy. If such a purchase brings with it technology and infrastructure, so much the better.
Nobody I know wants to see RIM evaporate, if only because of the negative impact this would have on our Canadian friends who work there, but in the circumstances to which the company's leaders have brought the company through their own decisions, these are crucial times.
Thursday's Earnings (3/29/12) Will Be Huge For RIM [View article]
There are folks who paid $485 for a new device.
There are no examples of where the 7 inch PlayBook mini-tablet performs better than the iPad, other than price. But you get what you pay for.
In terms of a mobile OS, iOS is in a completely different league to anything RIM can offer. It displays a remarkable absence of understanding of what a mobile OS needs to look like in order to claim that the confused muddle of QNX/Microsoft Active Sync/Android emulator is even remotely capable of being compared to iOS.
We see a comment about how much better the Android world is compared to Apple's iOS environment, along with criticism of those of us who disagree with this idea on the basis we're all too fanatical about Apple to see the error of our ways.
So it's relevant, I think, to give the views of someone who has jumped on the Android boat as a way of providing at least some apps on his company's QNX devices. This from RIM's head of Developer Relations Alex Saunders:
Alec Saunders@asaunders Piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don't want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android market
Chaotic.
Cesspool.
Yes, indeed. That's exactly the point we've been making all along.
Beware Of Book Value: Why I'm Not Buying RIM [View article]
@ AnecdotalEmpiricist
That's a sober assessment of a scenario for RIM. Hard to argue with your logic.
Because of the reasons I have provided elsewhere regarding the massive effort required to get app frameworks in place before QNX can be used by developers, RIM has gone the route of providing a short-term palliative through running an Android emulator under QNX. With this they intend to make QNX devices capable of running at least some Android apps. Is this a free ride for RIM?
No. It has already created an unwanted diversion for precious RIM internal resources they would undoubtedly prefer to direct at pure QNX development. Why is this? Because Android is the wild west, where anything goes. RIM knows the risk this represents to their brand.
They are having to implement their own controlled mechanism for restricting users in downloading Android apps onto RIM devices.
This from RIM's head of Developer Relations Alex Saunders:
Alec Saunders@asaunders Piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don't want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android market
Chaotic.
Cesspool.
Powerful stuff.
RIM's decision makes sense. But it is diverting resources from the strategic goal of QNX. As ever, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Beware Of Book Value: Why I'm Not Buying RIM [View article]
@ Marcap
Folks can just go about punting any number they like for the imagined value of whatever bits of RIM that resonate in their dreams, but unless they provide evidence or reasoned arguments, that's all the figures will be, punts in the dark. Most savvy investors I speak to ignore figures derived from wishful thinking.
Here's a report from November 2011. Does anyone believe anything in the interim has changed for the better?
RIM is now worth less than its assets By Brid-Aine Parnell •
Posted in Financial News, 3rd November 2011 16:56 GMT A fall in the share price of battered BlackBerry maker RIM puts the firm's market value below the value of ALL its stuff today.
With a share price of $18.59 at 12.21 EDT, Research in Motion's total stock added up to LESS than what its property, patents and other assets are worth, according to the book value of $18.92 a share calculated by Bloomberg at the end of last quarter.
[Since this report, an invesment house with a significant investment in RIM has positioned the share value as low as $7/share]
Who knows what someone would pay for RIM or even parts of RIM... but whoever is the buyer is surely going to take into account the same data that Bloomberg and the investment house used when coming to their conclusions.
Beware Of Book Value: Why I'm Not Buying RIM [View article]
@ Richard Bloch
Yes, the Australian authorities' designation of iOS as capable of carrying SECRET comms is significant.
In respect of the US Government, the move to iOS is already underway with many agencies.
The U.S. federal government is throwing away its BlackBerrys and replacing laptops with iPads, according to a new piece by The Washington Post.
For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs is letting its clinicians choose an iPad or iPhone instead of a BlackBerry.
According to Charlie Wolf, an analyst for Needham & Co., BlackBerry is a one-trick pony.
He states:
"The one trick was their secure messaging platform. Management has yet to understand that the world has changed. They didn’t understand that it was a software game going forward."
That's exactly the point I made.
More woes for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week that it would be handing out iPhones and iPads to its employees in May, replacing the BlackBerry devices currently used.
According to a Bloomberg report, the government agency, which carries out research into weather, oceans and fisheries, currently has about 3,000 of its 20,000 full-time workers and contractors using RIM devices. It’s not yet clear how many workers would be receiving Apple devices.
Speaking to Bloomberg, NOAA’s chief information officer Joe Klimavicz said that it would cost the agency less to securely integrate Apple devices into its information systems than RIM’s products. “Times are changing and technology is changing and we have to look at our technologies and see how we can do things more efficiently,”
A story by the Washington Post discusses how the Federal Government is gradually making the switch from BlackBerry to Apple. Special agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) watch surveillance videos on iPads. They note that even Obama, a known BlackBerry user, has an iPad as government starts making a move towards Apple devices.
US Air Force deploys 1800 iPads for logistics and cockpit usage, the first of an expected 18,000 deployment.
This is just some of what is going on.
The point is: reliance on its one trick pony of BES messaging security is a mistake. RIM will have no future if it does so, and there's no doubt in my mind that sane minds in RIM are aware of this and are working hard at providing more. It doesn't matter what uninformed opinion says, the market has spoken on this matter. The stream is already running, soon to turn into a torrent.
Apple: Why Is The 'Cult' Of Mac So Misunderstood? [View article]
Apple: Why Is The 'Cult' Of Mac So Misunderstood? [View article]
These so-called 'expert financial analysts' who dish outrageously ill-informed opinions about Apple's supposed 'problems' are nothing more than haruspices, snakeoil merchants peddling their 'insights' to part fools from their money.
No company is perfect, every company faces problems, nobody is immune from competitive threats, but after 30 years at the plough, Apple's got pretty damn good at what it does and it's most unlikely a guy in an expensive suit sitting at a desk in an ivory tower is going to figure something out the company hasn't already thought about.
I remember Sibelius' comment when someone told him 'The critics are not going to like your latest symphony.'
'Critics!?' he exploded, 'Critics? Whoever erected a statue to a critic?'
Steve Ballmer refuses to dismiss the possibility of a Microsoft (MSFT) smartphone down the line, even as his company shoots down rumors about near-term plans. Ballmer also tells channel partners Microsoft will stick to selling its Surface tablet through its own site and company stores, and makes clear whom it now considers to be public enemy #1. "We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple." (earlier) [View news story]
Microsoft's major threat is Google, not Apple.
He needs to be let out to pasture. Under his tenure the value of the company he inherited has not achieved its potential by a long chalk.
Considering The Downside Prospects For Apple [View article]
The day I see it quiet is the day I'll begin to wonder if the shine may have gone off this company.
Apple: Take Profits Before You Lose Them [View article]
Underestimating Apple: Analyst Consensus Plays Catch-Up [View article]
Apple: Take Profits Before You Lose Them [View article]
And that's only a part of the story. Many households have several Apple products.
There will always be people who will never buy Apple. That's choice at work in the market.
If you want to get a good view of how Apple is doing, just walk by any Apple Store anywhere in the world. If it's not humming I'll eat my hat. Nobody's forcing people into the store, nobody is forcing them to take money out to buy. That's choice at work in the market. Denying this is real doesn't change a thing.
Will Apple's Growth Stop In 2013? [View article]
Consistency is, of course, a key ingredient for long term success. Without that, a company goes from one thing to another, sometimes getting it right hopefully, other times scoring a big zero. If the zeros outweigh the hits, the company eventually fails
Along with consistency, another key aspect is the willingness to stick at it, through all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Now, here comes the rub. If you are both consistent and you stick at it, you CAN win.... BUT the objective has to be right, because if it's not, you consistently aim at the wrong thing and you stick at it no matter what, even if it's driving you into the ground.
And that's the huge difference between how Steve Jobs thought about things and how Steve Ballmer thinks about things. Jobs vision was to build beautiful things that enhanced a person's life and to do that as well as he knew how. He'd embrace something with enthusiasm but drop it if he came to realize it was off track, and on the other hand he'd just keep hammering away at something that couldn't be made to work until it could be made to work. The products to him were the delivery mechanism for the vision.
Ballmer's vision, on the other hand, is even simpler. He loves Microsoft, passionately. He says so every time he opens his mouth. In his eyes the company can do no wrong and - more - it can achieve anything it sets its mind to. Unfortunately, his vision is 'Windows everywhere'. That's it. The product, in other words, IS the vision.
You can't tell Ballmer Windows isn't going to be everywhere, that it's done, time to move on. That it's time to direct all the skills that built the Windows empire onto a new set of objectives. That's where consistency and sticking at it can kill you.
Why I Now Dislike Apple [View article]
Android, of course, has never 'outsold' iOS. It's free for anyone to use. That's the only reason the mass of cheap smartphones come with some flavour or other of Android. The key metric is: who is making the profit? Apple takes more profit from the smartphone sector than ALL the Android device makers put together.
By the way, there is nothing secure about the way the Android emulator is 'embedded' on QNX. That is an invention born perhaps from wishful thinking. A basic understanding of how the emulator is implemented would reveal this self-evident fact.
RIM expresses the view the 'chaotic cesspool' of the general Android environment will damage the RIM brand. No surprises there. Obvious from the start, really.
So RIM is now forced to retrace its steps and implement a RIM-specific mechanism whereby customers can download Android apps. This will involve curation of all apps deemed suitable for RIM. This is a non trivial task, as RIM will discover. It requires a carefully thought out technical, administrative and accounting strategy and a well executed implementation.
Bravo! The penny has dropped. Curation is mandatory for a secure environment. Precisely the point Apple has been making all along, and a key component of the iOS AppStore from Day 1. Of course, there's a lot more to the issue, but this will be a good start for RIM.
Thursday's Earnings (3/29/12) Will Be Huge For RIM [View article]
It's hard to see what the company has to offer Apple, other than a bundle of management headaches and potentially damaging patent actions from Kodak and others that it can well do without.
RIM's Jewel in the Crown, its BES email and messaging security, has been left behind by Apple's comprehensive data and messaging security infrastructure. Apple is fully certified to carry SECRET level data and communications by Australia's security services, who are partners with the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA in a worldwide structure. Expect certification to occur with all the partners. There's nothing for Apple to learn from BES.
Apple already owns the patents it bought jointly with RIM, and my guess is there's nothing else of significance in RIM's portfolio that Apple needs. Apple seems to be doing just fine with its own technologies.
In terms of 'burying' RIM, there's no need for Apple to do anything other than continue to provide its own product line. Customers will decide what to buy using their common sense and, incidentally, their own money.
The key asset in RIM that could attract a buyer is the BlackBerry brand. Brands with worldwide recognition are expensive to build. A no-name me-too brand in China or India, trying to step past Samsung onto the world stage could find BlackBerry an attractive buy. If such a purchase brings with it technology and infrastructure, so much the better.
Nobody I know wants to see RIM evaporate, if only because of the negative impact this would have on our Canadian friends who work there, but in the circumstances to which the company's leaders have brought the company through their own decisions, these are crucial times.
Thursday's Earnings (3/29/12) Will Be Huge For RIM [View article]
There are no examples of where the 7 inch PlayBook mini-tablet performs better than the iPad, other than price. But you get what you pay for.
In terms of a mobile OS, iOS is in a completely different league to anything RIM can offer. It displays a remarkable absence of understanding of what a mobile OS needs to look like in order to claim that the confused muddle of QNX/Microsoft Active Sync/Android emulator is even remotely capable of being compared to iOS.
Why I Now Dislike Apple [View article]
So it's relevant, I think, to give the views of someone who has jumped on the Android boat as a way of providing at least some apps on his company's QNX devices. This from RIM's head of Developer Relations Alex Saunders:
Alec Saunders@asaunders
Piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don't want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android market
Chaotic.
Cesspool.
Yes, indeed. That's exactly the point we've been making all along.
Beware Of Book Value: Why I'm Not Buying RIM [View article]
That's a sober assessment of a scenario for RIM. Hard to argue with your logic.
Because of the reasons I have provided elsewhere regarding the massive effort required to get app frameworks in place before QNX can be used by developers, RIM has gone the route of providing a short-term palliative through running an Android emulator under QNX. With this they intend to make QNX devices capable of running at least some Android apps. Is this a free ride for RIM?
No. It has already created an unwanted diversion for precious RIM internal resources they would undoubtedly prefer to direct at pure QNX development. Why is this? Because Android is the wild west, where anything goes. RIM knows the risk this represents to their brand.
They are having to implement their own controlled mechanism for restricting users in downloading Android apps onto RIM devices.
This from RIM's head of Developer Relations Alex Saunders:
Alec Saunders@asaunders
Piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don't want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android market
Chaotic.
Cesspool.
Powerful stuff.
RIM's decision makes sense. But it is diverting resources from the strategic goal of QNX. As ever, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Beware Of Book Value: Why I'm Not Buying RIM [View article]
Folks can just go about punting any number they like for the imagined value of whatever bits of RIM that resonate in their dreams, but unless they provide evidence or reasoned arguments, that's all the figures will be, punts in the dark. Most savvy investors I speak to ignore figures derived from wishful thinking.
Here's a report from November 2011. Does anyone believe anything in the interim has changed for the better?
RIM is now worth less than its assets
By Brid-Aine Parnell •
Posted in Financial News, 3rd November 2011 16:56 GMT
A fall in the share price of battered BlackBerry maker RIM puts the firm's market value below the value of ALL its stuff today.
With a share price of $18.59 at 12.21 EDT, Research in Motion's total stock added up to LESS than what its property, patents and other assets are worth, according to the book value of $18.92 a share calculated by Bloomberg at the end of last quarter.
[Since this report, an invesment house with a significant investment in RIM has positioned the share value as low as $7/share]
Who knows what someone would pay for RIM or even parts of RIM... but whoever is the buyer is surely going to take into account the same data that Bloomberg and the investment house used when coming to their conclusions.
Beware Of Book Value: Why I'm Not Buying RIM [View article]
Yes, the Australian authorities' designation of iOS as capable of carrying SECRET comms is significant.
In respect of the US Government, the move to iOS is already underway with many agencies.
The U.S. federal government is throwing away its BlackBerrys and replacing laptops with iPads, according to a new piece by The Washington Post.
For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs is letting its clinicians choose an iPad or iPhone instead of a BlackBerry.
According to Charlie Wolf, an analyst for Needham & Co., BlackBerry is a one-trick pony.
He states:
"The one trick was their secure messaging platform. Management has yet to understand that the world has changed. They didn’t understand that it was a software game going forward."
That's exactly the point I made.
More woes for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week that it would be handing out iPhones and iPads to its employees in May, replacing the BlackBerry devices currently used.
According to a Bloomberg report, the government agency, which carries out research into weather, oceans and fisheries, currently has about 3,000 of its 20,000 full-time workers and contractors using RIM devices. It’s not yet clear how many workers would be receiving Apple devices.
Speaking to Bloomberg, NOAA’s chief information officer Joe Klimavicz said that it would cost the agency less to securely integrate Apple devices into its information systems than RIM’s products.
“Times are changing and technology is changing and we have to look at our technologies and see how we can do things more efficiently,”
A story by the Washington Post discusses how the Federal Government is gradually making the switch from BlackBerry to Apple. Special agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) watch surveillance videos on iPads. They note that even Obama, a known BlackBerry user, has an iPad as government starts making a move towards Apple devices.
US Air Force deploys 1800 iPads for logistics and cockpit usage, the first of an expected 18,000 deployment.
This is just some of what is going on.
The point is: reliance on its one trick pony of BES messaging security is a mistake. RIM will have no future if it does so, and there's no doubt in my mind that sane minds in RIM are aware of this and are working hard at providing more. It doesn't matter what uninformed opinion says, the market has spoken on this matter. The stream is already running, soon to turn into a torrent.