sleepy

Buying Apple Today: Like Buying Microsoft in 1998?

One way I like to look at this is to consider the market cap of whole markets that Apple is in (PC's; cellphones; music and video players; music and video distribution; web services; retail; music, photo and video creation) and estimate the smallest market cap Apple might take from incumbents in each market. The answer gives a surprisingly large total, even without Apple being a dominant player in any market. (And that's before you consider retail banking as a possible market for Apple - give it a few moments thought. A hundred million credit cards registered could become a hundred million retail banking customers.)

Apple knows full well that the market is more powerful than itself (unlike Microsoft, although Microsoft may finally be learning). So Apple can't rush off into the distance with innovation; to move the whole market they have to keep their innovation bottled up and let the competition get close enough to keep up. Some read this as risk from competition and falling margins but it's simply Apple playing its unbeatable hand for maximum long term gain.

Palm: Dead Company Walking

If you think iPhone isn't able to multitask, you're rather naive; it's a choice for third party apps that can be reversed at any moment by Apple if it ever looks like a good idea. Just one reason why it's not a good idea - battery life. Apple told us about iPhone battery life at the unveiling in Jan '97 but Palm hasn't told us about Pre battery life.

If you think Pre's performance is due to superior software - you're wrong. It's due to having a CPU 3 times as fast as current iPhones. That's an option available for the next iPhone, out around the same time as Pre, probably.

Pre effectively doesn't have native apps; they're all just web apps. iPhone has web apps. With the latest CPU and javascript engines, this year's iPhone will probably be at least as fast as Pre for web apps, and much faster than Pre for native apps, which Pre lacks.

Pre is a very nice product, but as Apple and Next learned over the past twenty years, that's not the first consideration of the market.

We also don't know the price for Pre. Does Sprint have deep pockets to subsidize it? I'm not sure.

This article is spot on. Palm make great products. They don't make money.