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Tim Cook Prefers Settling To Suing and Has a Huge Quarter
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's current legal battles with Samsung encapsulate a large number of patents, innumerable suits and counter-suits, and have resulted in legal motions in 11 jurisdictions across the globe. As you may remember, Steve Jobs in his biography was quite vocal about his intent to go thermonuclear on Android, vowing to spend every last dime in Apple's coffers to destroy Google's mobile OS. But Tim Cook is a bit more level headed about things, expressing during Apple's earnings conference call yesterday that he has has always hated litigation and would much rather settle than to battle in court. The caveat, of course, is that Cook doesn't want Apple to 'become the developer for the world.'" It may not be what Jobs would do, but as zacharye notes, it doesn't seem to be hurting earnings. "Despite early-morning jitters on Wall Street, Apple on Tuesday reported yet another blow-out quarter. The Cupertino, California-based company managed the second most profitable quarter in its history, posting a net profit of $11.6 billion on $39.2 billion in sales. Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones into channels last quarter, along with 11.8 million iPads, 7.7 million iPods and 4 million Mac computers. While the firm continues to dominate the technology industry — Apple is currently the most valuable company in the world — several analysts think Apple is just getting started."
Developer for the world sounds like a bit of a tall claim.
Apple really don't invent much new stuff. What they are excellent at is combining existing, often poorly implemented, inventions into very well polished consumer products. That's their business and they're very good at it.
But, it shouldn't be subject to patent protection, and their patents tend to be dubious at best.
The other thing is that patents or not, it's an extremely hard thing to copy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
To bad the summory missed the best quote of the conference call
Finally, one analyst dared ask a question about Apple's litigation battles when it comes to patents. "I've always hated litigation and I continue to hate it," Cook said, but "we just want people to invent their own stuff."
He is still an arrogant ass (yes I will probably lose some karma for that one)
Ah, you've been digging up pundit's predictions from 2002, I see.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Your post doesn't make any sense. You can't accumulate, store, or access data without hardware. Advertising is a different industry than the ones Apple chiefly participates in (iAd being a mere blip on their earnings report). Apple's products are not viewed as commodities by the market, which is why they command huge margins--margins that went up year over year if you bothered to read the earnings report. Apple's products have been copied and copied again and they still maintain premium status in the eyes of the consumer--margins haven't been destroyed and there's no reason to think they will be in the near term.
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"Settle" translation: We want Google to pay us lots and lots of money for OUR ideas (which we took from everyone who came before us -- and never paid for.).
I never thought I'd see "a ray of sanity" followed by a request for Flash on more products.
several analysts think Apple is just getting started
I find this particularly interesting since I would assume that market penetration should be causing their growth to slow -- hell they did worse than they did last quarter which, although still good, is a sign they're slowing somewhat, right? So I looked it up on this BGR blog site and it appears that only one analyst thinks so, Brian White. Can anyone provide several other analysts who thing "Apple is just getting started"?
I also found some of Brian White's quotes to be less than analytical:
“Apple fever rocks on”
and
"Apple fever is spreading like a wildfire around the world and we see no end in sight to this trend"
I hate to engage in character assassination but that really doesn't sound like any of the analyst reports I've ever read. They're usually dry as hell and stick to the numbers. Numbers numbers numbers, usually that's all that matters. Anyone got numbers on market penetration instead of telling me "Apple fever has no end in sight"?
My work here is dung.
A sage move. I mean, look at how sales have fallen off since the "marketing genius" died...
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I don't want them to let Flash on iDevices. I've refused to install Flash on my development machine at work since before there was an iPhone (well, before the world at large knew about it, anyway), and IMO the web has improved with the reduction of Flash use where it was entirely unnecessary.
The only downside to all this is the ads that used to use Flash (and thus were automatically blocked for me, no effort necessary) are now using other techniques that don't rely on browser plugins.
The thing with Adobe is that it's by no means all Apple's fault.
One of the core issues was Adobe's creative suite, when they ported it to OS X they used Carbon rather than Cocoa. They knew Carbon wouldn't live forever yet they threw a temper tantrum when Apple started dropping Carbon in favor of the all-Cocoa future. Then they seemed to realize that if they dropped OS X as a platform they'd most likely end up losing customers as others (possibly including Apple themselves) filled the void, apparently they figure out that users of Adobe software on Apple platforms are generally more loyal to Apple than Adobe...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Adobe killed mobile Flash last year. Are you expecting Apple to now build their own Flash client implementation for this buggy, insecure, dying technology? Jobs was right about Flash.
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The "ray of sanity" is allowing the user to decide.
You don't need to be a jerk. You don't need to be a megalomaniac.
Being both of those things just makes it obvious you are a threat to the community at large. You shouldn't do that before you have gotten yourself fully entrenched. An appropriate smack down is much more likely to be effective.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Simple really. It's the Golden Rule.
He who has the gold, rules.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Wrong. The holiday quarter and quarters containing new product launches have a huge influence over revenue. You can't measure things quarter to quarter, you have to go to the year ago quarter to check growth and even then you have to take into consideration if one or the other was a launch quarter.
If you want to know why certain people (yours truly included) are betting big on AAPL, consider this:
.
And also realize that the phone market is a billion+ handsets per year. Their customers love the iPhone more than any other phone and so the growth potential is huge.
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And what makes you think they'll stop inventing new devices?
As someone involved the tech world in exactly this "data is king" business model, I can tell you from direct experience that there's a hard limit on the value of data, and that's the value placed on it by business consumers. To quote the Calgary Flames marketing department, "we don't give a shit about surveying our customers". And they don't. They know who their customers are, what their demographic profile is, etc. They cared about (and used) our product because it offered another avenue of engagement, which is a separate concern.
Everyone involved in the data side always spins great fantasies about precision marketing and deep knowledge of your customers, without acknowledging that in many cases, deep knowledge isn't even useful or worth paying for because it doesn't increase engagement or conversion rates or redemption ratios. Remember Xmarks, the bookmarks plugin people who thought there'd be tremendous value in having an aggregate-able database of everyone's bookmarks? They built that database, and then ran out of money because no one wanted to do anything with it. They were saved only because someone else saw an opportunity to sell a premium version of their plugin.
I'm not saying data's worthless, by any means. But it's not particularly valuable in and of itself.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Is it anything like Batman's giant penny?
> Destroying Flash, which is taking .NET with it, is about the best thing Apple has done in the last ten years.
Taking .NET with it? Huh? The new hot thing in the mobile development space is C#/Mono (Open source .NET) because it's the only language/platform that's available on iOS/Android/Windows (Is it also on BlackBerry? I don't know.) Phone. You write 95% of your mobile code in Mono/Ximian and then only need some native 'glue code' to hook the UI to the shareable code. How's the taking .NET with it?
Sure, you can take pot shots at Windows Phone, and I don't know how that is going to turn out, but Microsoft has not really began that battle yet, not until Windows 8 is ready. They may lose this time, but they've always been late to the game and then monstrously won over time.
But still Windows Phone is not the point. Apple killing Flash has nothing to do with killing .NET. HTML5 is killing Flash, and Silverlight, but it's not really Apple killing either one. It's that there's finally a working cross-platform HTML specification available.
They are still selling products developed in the Jobs era. The product pipeline is the big concern. The next iphone will be the first phone developed without any oversight from Jobs. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
Personally, I think some cracks are already showing. The iPad 3 was mostly a tech update. Siri, the main feature of the last iPhone, has usability issues that make it a lightly used curiosity. Siri is the kind of feature that Jobs was legendary for forcing his engineers to get working flawlessly. If you read about him, he was a completely hands-on micromanaging perfectionist when it came to product design. He would critique every minute detail, until he got it just the way he wanted, with little regard to cost. He was also a great pitch man. Somehow he got you excited about a bookstore on your phone.
I think Apple's success is wonderful, but I fear that without Jobs, the company is going to flounder, just like it did in the 90s. I really hope that doesn't happen, Apple makes great products. But I won't be buying their stock until I see a few successful product releases in the post-Jobs era.
Yeah. All those millions and millions of people are "brain dead fanbois." It couldn't be that Apple has done a good job inbound marketing, product design, product line segmentation, supply chain management, vertical integration, distribution, retail, and outbound marketing. What an incisive analysis...
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According to Wikipedia:
"There are three freely convertible currencies in the world, but none of them count. The American Dollar has recently collapsed, the Renminbi is only exchangeable for other Renminbi, and the Apple Quarter has its own very special problems. It exchange rate of five Apple Nickels to one Apple Quarter is simple enough, but since an Apple Quarter is worth $100 billions, no one has ever collected enough to own one Apple Quarter. Canadian Tire bills are not negotiable currency, because banks refuse to deal with monopoly money. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the banks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
Argh. This is a problem - everyone makes that mistake. But those are Susan B. Anthony dollars - not quarters.
#DeleteChrome
A short look at the numbers shows that their quarter actually sucked. They sold less units in this quarter than they did in the last quarter.
Almost no one compares quarter to quarter results for this simple reason: Apple's Q2 covers Jan - Mar. Q1 covers Oct - Dec (the holiday season). For a consumer electronics company, you'd expect them to have a slight drop off in sales after the holidays.
The opposite quarter-over-quarter was true for the same period in '11.
Where do you get that? Apple's numbers in millions of units:
Q1 2011
Q2 2011:
Q1 2012
Q2 2012
Except for iPods which are constantly declining they are increasing sales year to year.
Their absolute numbers are higher than they were last year because they entered new markets. But they are already declining in these new markets after being there for only 2 quarters.
I don't understand how you came to this analysis. The iPad was launched in 2009. Every years it sells more and more. The iPhone was launched in 2007. Every year, more are sold.
They have not gained any market share on Android.
So one company with variations of one phone manage to sell more every year with a majority of the profit, yet cannot outsell dozens of companies with hundreds of models but don't make as much profit and you're not impressed. Also same company pretty much has the majority of tablet sales. You're not impressed.
Everyone is trying to compare them to last year because it's something to compare to which shows an increase. But a quarter-over-quarter decrease is a very troubling sign.
No this is not a sign of trouble because your analysis is faulty. Everyone else is doing the analysis correctly. Year to year is the way to do it.
And they haven't quite beat the reduced market estimates. The estimates were that they would sell 13 million iPads. They sold less than 12 million iPads.
Please. Half the analysts have said that Apple was going to release a iPhone mini years ago. An iPad mini, etc. Analysts predictions are always off.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes and no. At time when these platforms were announced, Classic was for backwards compatibility. Carbon was acceptable for future use as an intermediate step but it was always stated eventually Cocoa would be the ultimate platform. The shelf life of Carbon was not set in stone. I think Apple played around with the idea of Carbon 64, but decided to kill it for a few reasons. First of which was that a lot of the functionality was already in Cocoa and second, Adobe was one of the few developers that were asking for it. Now you can still use Carbon and some parts of the OS X is still Carbon; however, if you want 64 bit and other advanced features, you should use Cocoa.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Would you also say that BMW and Mercedes will be unable to command higher margins long term?
Apple doesn't just sell hardware. They are selling devices + software + services and as gatekeepers to the ecosystem, they are taking a healthy cut of all the revenue that their devices generate. Even if their hardware margins slip, the ecosystem is large and healthy enough that their profits should continue to astound.
The Dell's and HP's of the world know they are screwed in the consumer space because they can't match the Apple experience because they only control a small part of the product. Microsoft is trying hard to copy, but they just don't have the talent, vision, or reputation. I think Amazon could challenge Apple or maybe even Facebook. It really is shocking how quickly Microsoft is losing the consumer market and how unresponsive they have been.
More like Jobs had a huge quarter. Once Tim's been in charge and the germinating seeds Jobs planted aren't still coming to fruition, Tim can go ahead and take the credit. If, in a few years, the company is still making money hand over fist, I'll salute him. Right now it's Thanks Steve. RIP
They protect an implementation of an idea. If someone else can implement the idea in a way that doesn't infringe on the patent, you're good.
well, maybe in the 19th century. since then things have changed. how else do you explain slide to unlock being patentable ip? not the code behind how it's done, not the loops going on in the program.. not the way electrons are arranged to move between transistors to achieve it.. but the thing that a bitmap changes position on the screen when the detected point of finger touching the screen moves and that causes a program to run.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Whether it's Apple innovating, or someone else, the patent system needs some desperate repairs.
And settling with Trolls does not do this. Settlements tend to be under NDAs, and therefore nobody knows how much was bled, how little the gain was, or how much you can hold a corporation hostage for. This leads to a prospectors climate, and the only way out is to force things into actual litigation and set new precedents.
It's short sighted of Apple (Cook) to avoid such lawsuits. They have the biggest war chest (what, still the better part of a trillion USD in cash holdings?), and can fix this problem for the rest of the tech sector. I feel that Jobs did this to some extent with the RIAA, and it makes Cook look spineless and short term report focused.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
The Apple logo is an apple with a bite out of it, a reference to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge, but who suggested a bite be taken? None other than Satan, clearly Jobs made a deal with the Devil.
That's why Apple is so successful. /snark
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They might not hurt each other but they hurt everyone else in the process. This has shown how the future might turn out, with everyone using patents to keep the other side from competing and ultimately making sure that any new comer either has to buy a lot of patents OR has to spend a fortune licensing up front of any actual earnings making it again impossible for a small startup to get started.
Steve Jobs showed himself to be a really bad apple, in human society, you got to learn not to take afront of every slight against you. Imagine that every tiny little mishap in traffic was to be settled in court, we would all be in court for eternity. Often you just have to let it go and accept that shit happens. The supposed sameness of the iPad and Galaxy Tab devices showed just how far Jobs was gone. There is only so much you can do with design and Apple was NOT itself original with either its design OR in spending effort on designing the packaging. Hell, if you buy higher end products, you would have long since gotten used to the fact that not all products come in brows boxes with white styrofoam.
That they looked similar? Yes? Have you looked at other items where design plays a role? In most industries this is not just accpeted, historians and art experts point to specific periods when EVERYONE did EVERYTHING in the same style. Sometimes one person leads and the rest follows. Imagine if Picasso was to have sued every other painter who copied his style of Cubism. Unthinkable right? And it is not like in paintings that design is dictated by functionality. You can paint any style you want. Just how many shapes can you make a tablet before you end up with something unusable?
And that was Jobs entire plan, to stop ANYONE else from making a tablet without having to make a device because sooner that could function. Oops, no rectangular screen for you. Rounding of the corners? no no. It would be fine if Jobs had designed the very first tablet or made it unique but the iPad was far from the first and hardly original in its design.
For the average civilian out there, competition is not just a good thing, it is essential. We have seen what happens in IT land without competition. IE and Intel are prime examples. MS did nothing with the browser when they had no competition and Intel just stopped innovating until AMD kicked their asses and forced them to get serious again.
Perhaps what is needed is something kind of law similar to FRAND patents but now for design. The official regoniztion that sometimes function influences design to such a degree that it is silly to award a single design to a single company.
All slab phones will look similar simply because they are a rectangular screen with a speaker, a mic and a button. About the only thing you can change is the font of the logo. Yes, putting a lighted pear symbol on the back is a bit to far but rounded corners? Dimensions? Why not try to trademark a screen resolution and be done with it.
Sometimes the world needs innovators who push things and are filled with fire to get things done. And then the suits need to take over to avoid everyone constantly challenging everyone else to duels. It is the reason diplomacy is done by diplomats, NOT politicians. Diplomats are generally soft spoken individuals who think in decades rather then next weeks poll. And they mostly spend their time trying to downplay the latest politicians gaff. Steve Jobs put Apple in a bad position. Did he really think he was going to fucking bury Android? He did it before and he can do it again? Gosh, someone else said something very similar and HE is a figure of ridicule in IT and especially on this site.
Not everyone is equally good at everything and Apple should just have left this to a suit who knows spreadsheets. The spreadsheet after all shows clearly that copy or not, the galaxy tab is no threat. Why ruin your good name and risk legal battles that could (and have) gone against you when the boring sales figures show that there is no reason to fight. The only reason f
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.