Their little cat fight with Samsung put a dent in those margins and the more enemies Apple make the less those margins will be. The figures according to Bloomberg are.... (Apple vs Samsung here).
Now, I was told this could be an annual thing, I.E due to the product launch and margins suffer due to the costs of the launch, though I feel that's not correct because the product's price is always higher during the initial launch and then reduce as product ages in the market.
With some of the productivity issues faced and the margins on components getting slammed (i.e Samsung's recent price hike on apple components) these figures could be a continued trend.
What I like about the trend for Samsung is that it's showing solid steady growth (half of what Apple is doing but it's steady). Apple's just seem overly chaotic which for analysts would worry them a little.
Funny story about Telstra. Wife called them up concerned that she couldn't find the latest Twilight movie on TBox. Sufficed to say the "accented man" Filipino / Indian guy gave her a bittorrent address and told her she can download the movie from there:)
Its not about learning it's about putting those resources to good use. How long did it take for the guys down the street to build the local shopping centre? times it by i don't know 100 and then you'll have an idea of what it may take to get the job done.
Saying that you're moving is all well and good, having the intention of moving is good also, but doing it is an entirely different creature.
Take the minerals trade for instance, it isn't a matter of one day going, okay lets dig holes and export this stuff. Training a fleet alone will take 6+ months, the preparation of training probably 6 months as well. Picking the right machinery, building the right infrastructure, approval for such infrastructure and the red tape associated. On and on and on... and wait to get sued by someone that will slow you down in the entire process (or the million other possible things that could go wrong).
The US has the brains and the brawn, it simply doesn't have a magic time machine which is what's missing. And on a final note, we're talking about the tech industry, it moves to fast, that's the key issue here.
Nice to think they will be hiring herebut still a fascinating insult to U.S. manufacturing prowess, dontcha think – the idea that actually making Apple products is a little too complicated for Americans to handle
I don't agree with that statement, it has nothing to do with insulting the US, rather it's all about product control.
If you look at the way the game is played it's simple. America bombs Arabs to control oil production. America can't bomb Asia, truth of the matter is America would love to have production things like iPhones. The manufacturing countries/companies out of Asia though love to splash horrible working conditions and pin buying an iPhone worse then buying blood diamonds though what it boils down to is that "they are in charge".
Moving manufacturing back to the US has to be done by the vendors themselves, the process would take the better part of 10 years to get right in the meantime. That sweltering bank account Apple has, might be used for that, though it wont buy the time back Apple will lose to catch back up in the market to do so, You're basically telling your investors that you cant produce a worthy product till 2017+
I get the angst being a tech myself I really do. My impressions of Microsoft however are not that cynical and I'll tell you why.
- Apple is the king of product placement. Yet suffer when it comes to competition entering their markets. - Google is the king of taking OSS and wrapping smart business models around them. - Microsoft is the thief, they either acquire or "establish" a strategic partnership and then assimilate.
I feel that though the MS regime has been subsided, however, they are a stable stock and are active within "most" if not pretty much all computing circles. The model they adhere to is still well in motion. The GFC may of assisted in slowing it down and Balmer's rookie like aptitude to position of CEO may of swelled some fundamental short comings of his own (and the company as a whole) but they seem to be moving on from the GFC and Balmer has had about 10 years in the role (just a rough guess).
Apple suffers from the same aptitude problem at the moment. If you look at the CEO of Apple there is maybe 4 people on this planet (1 that is no longer) that have similar resumes as Tim Cook's, that is Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Page.
We have to consider Cook who is now the rookie out of these people and this position as being "too big for his boots". I'd say Cook is starting to show Balmer like traits and I'd consider much of what has done recently with the Maps, etc and then the axing of the iOS product guys a perfect display of this.
Skype, Surface, Xbox, now a phone, Windows 8, maps, office, voice recognition, skydive, etc etc.
They hold many cards old Microsoft, now that they've starting to tie all these components into a single working organism, along side the sinking share price of Apple. The battlegrounds have been set and this is the first move of Microsoft's new borgification.
What is going to happen is this, we're going to start seeing consolidated product offerings of this calibre which will be focused in reshaping the lounge room, the office, the kids bedroom, the parents bedroom, they've only really left out the kitchen (maybe we'll see Sink OS at some point).
Please tell me amongst the FOSS lovers and Apple punces that dwell on this board that there's someone else out there can see what this minor but well placed move has done? Again, I'm not here to endorse any of this (as people keep thinking i do) I'm just using my own vision and personal experience to draw this conclusion.
MS has made poor moves in the past few years, yet for every poor move one could say it was a strategy to end up at this turning point.
They did this at the perfect time, they've allowed the Skype customer base to become comfortable with their new overlords and now the turn the dark side has become complete!
As for Facebook and it ties with Skype, I'd be very worried about what data gets shared between the two, in fact who in their right mind would of allowed such a partnership to take place... wait wait... yes Facebook's run by Mark Z... I bet he didn't see this coming, so what now? slap a photo gallery app on the side of Skype and you have a better version of Facebook? Hows that 15 or so year "shelf life" on Facebook's platform looking now investors ?:)
The same camera connection kit that has voltage issues that only reads specific files, the same camera connection kit that needs voltage hacks implemented to do anything useful with.
Yeah dumb ass why aren't you using the camera connection kit!
This is what I keep telling people WinRT _DOES_ have desktop mode, this is whole point to my argument. Also during the Surface keynote they were demoing Adobe Photoshop (most likely faked though) on Windows RT.
Now, if you look at it is still quite infant and somewhat restricted (as it only runs ms apps now) but this one feature alone paves the future of tablet computing IMHO.
I'm not sure if you're understanding what I'm saying. Let me break this down. I'm not endorsing Microsoft or Surface. What I'm saying is the Surface has benchmarked the next few years of tablet computing.
What has Microsoft done? well they've taken a very agile piece of technology that they didn't invent (which mind you has been around for ages waiting for something like this). I.E ARM* and they have used it too fill a market gap, which is the gap between Tablet to PC.
It's really up to the rest of the industry to refine it. Apple has to go back to the drawing board for this as well. So the question for the now is "Can Apple provide a merged platform of iOS and Lion as one system?" stick it on the iPad and compete with what Surface has done? The answer as far as I can see is no, and saying people wont want it as a feature is just dickheaded, damn yes people want it, it's an important part of mobile computing growth, Its about as important as what Doom was to Wolf3D IMHO.
Android which I have to say being a Linux user through on through, will not be able to touch this market with a 10ft pole. It's sad but true nonetheless.
* Please leave any vague references out of the conversation, this is now this is what's in the press at the moment.
Average users as they want something that looks cool
Stop right there the Apple UI hasn't changed since System 7 you can't tell me black on white is _that_ cool.
that their friends use and has all the cool apps they are familiar with.
Like YouTube and Google maps? Couldn't agree more.
I spoke to a phone salesmen and he told me Nokia has the highest returns in his store. The Nokia luima actually and didn't recommend it!
I spoke to a salesperson today aswell, see I wanted a tablet for my wife so she could plug it in to her (i think olympus) camera and then upload her photos to DropBox. The guy told me come back in a few weeks when the Windows tablets are in. He also said that it was something the iPad isn't capable of, which really I'd consider is a pretty damn remedial task.
In closing, Apple was a fashionable brand like Gucci. Nokia IS a fashionable, not in the US of course but it sells well everywhere else. I'd wage half the Apple consumer market if not more wouldn't even know what version iOS they run, in short, no they don't, only Geeks do, its our job too.
As for Elopp, yes he's right, just as the concept that Surface has a "Zune like future" as most people say but Surface has done its job already. It's over benched Apple in the tablet arena and given steam to rest of the market to see and know what to do with a particular market space. MS knows this and now will do it for the phone market.
He's right and the truth of the matter is with the exception of Acer who has basically signed its own death warrant by not consigning to windows will be suddenly left in the cold. Push vendors to create competitive devices by brandishing your own is a good strategy.
Sorry guys, nobody cares what OS is on a phone. Only Geeks do and normal people will by Nokia because its a good brand and if half the devices out there run the same system (like what surface+windows8 is doing) users will just buy it without a care to what a tech review has to say.
Nokia phones rock, they are even better with an OS like WP on it, I really do hate Microsoft with a passion but I cannot knock what they've done with WP7 and the Luima 900. Upon using a Nokia phone you get one important thing you miss with the iPhone, that is its a phone, not a handheld computer with a gsm module tacked on to it which even after all these years is what the iPhone still looks and feels like.
Year: Total Assets VS Total Liabilities 2008-12-31: 8,314.00 vs 5,642.00 (67.86%) 2009-12-31: 13,813.00 vs 8,556.00 (61.94%) 2010-12-31: 18,797.00 vs 11,933.00 (63.48%) 2011-12-31: 25,278.00 vs 17,521.00 (69.31%)
Problem seems pretty straight forward from here and considering that some of the assets which include very little long term items. Goodwill factoring in 2bn of that 25bn and most of their assets are server farms and property you have to consider and without doing any deeper checks it's current liabilities are not too bad against prior years.
This isn't a sign of a company "growing" because they have very little or NO _long term_ items. This is all short term stuff is quickly depreciable and the bigger the company gets the bigger the liabilities. 7% slump is a lot over 12 months, it's enough to scare people.
I may not be a finance expert as you said but I know how to run a business and I know i wouldn't allow such a basic level of business mechanics fail so easily and allow it to continue to fail for a while 12 months. Something is wrong and they aren't fixing it.
If you're going to play the "I know about stocks better than you" card I suggest you look at Amazon's balance sheet, they're doomed unless they can fix the business. All Amazon is doing now is juggling the expenditure vs income to make itself look better in the eyes of investors but they are not fixing core issues.
Check the balance sheet, check its history and u can see the grave being dug deeper and deeper...
See what many don't get is IT pros around the would don't like their trade being categorised so easily. What "cloud" is doing is quantifying these layers.
Quantifying the layer simplifies it. If something technical becomes simple then business-heads can understand it (end-to-end) and then what happens is bushiness people do what business people do, that is begin to remove the layer, streamline the layer, outsource the layer, etc. Cloud stops what used to be quite complex thing from being a long laborious costly component to business and quantifies it in a neat little bundle ANNNND when you do that and you can remove / downgrade / retrench the people you need to run it.
IT pros hate it cloud because it gets IT pros fired, makes them less relevant, and less important.
Yeah, still not right. I'm sure Ford had the same discussions internally about Chevy at some point.
Patents and Patent Infringement are not about protecting / stealing ideas, they are about protecting / stealing the particular method of an idea. The rest IMHO is justifiable hogwash built to create "outs" for companies to sue one another. Patent law shouldn't be applicable to what colors are used, what shape things are. It's evident that the products differ it's also evident that they are the SAME product.
That's rich. When will we see the day that poor old Linux gets put in the Apple vs MS argument, I mean really. Is it too much to ask Apple lovers to argue logically? Oh you dont like Apple you MUST like Microsoft instead!
Desktop market is gone to MS and that crown will remain for some time but if we are talking about PC's in people's pocket we seriously have to consider the 3 big players, Google, Apple, MS. Not just Apple vs MS. I'd actually say MS hasn't EVEN come to the party yet!
Did it occur that the GP was an Android fan?
I wont mention the fact that Apple's biggest industry is mobile pc and desktop where they own a only a little piece of the action. I just thought that point was inferred by the fact that the article was talking about a court case BETWEEN Apple and Samsung (Android) and NOT Microsoft (for a change:))
P/E is one way to value a company. Apple's price though dependant on P/E isn't the only ratio that's a factor. The P/E has slipped but its the stability of the business model which also employs Apple's desirability as a share price.
In essence, the good raving tech reviews, its retail presence and its commercial support all factor into the equation.
Tech reviews are slipping and it's not making expected analyst outcomes regarding sales, though it still has a tremendous way to go, in some ways the GP does have a point, even if he/she doesn't know the root of where that point lays.
The discussion of if Apple will gain a 1T marketcap has successfully been taken off the table and out of the reach of what considered a reality.
Not sure if I completely see what your saying making too much sense.
1bn users accessing a DB which, Yes, polls and manages a large amount of data, YES. However, you just slammed YouTube for doing pretty much the same thing but only exponentially better. Lets not forget massive amounts of comment management, video relevancy tools, algorithms that automatically scour video clips for copyright infringement and convert text to speech, etc so on an so fourth.
You bounced from the statement from " The complexity and joins of various database tables must be insane" to the statement "each of those 1 billion users has an entirely different set of friends from which recent (basically real-time) data must be polled - over, and over, and over again". That last statement contracts your comparison to YT.
Now for my take on it, what Facebook does, it does badly, if their search tool; their ad placement engines; their "3.74" degrees of separation algorithm, which LinkedIn does better than; all achieved say a Google level implementation of similar feature sets then I would tend to agree with you, it doesn't, it's half the reason why the company is fumbling as it cant do these things at a level that makes sense to the end user many times. My wife had Russian Bride ads show up in her FB photo gallery last night, WTF?
Also lets not mention that the most laborious parts of Facebook I.E their Maps and translation services are run primarily through Bing / Microsoft and the rest of their intensive services such as games are done off their platform and done via their API.
I'm sorry stop you right there, you're trying to tell me Marketers are smart? scientific, calculated individuals with the capacity to introduce intelligence into their the daily work/life?
Sorry, not buying it, most Marketers I know are flaming idiots that live by an archaic formula of easy is good, complex is bad and if it's complex bury your head in the sand until is passes, then live life when everything is easy all over again.
You joke but the funny thing I find is the power of advertising. I remember watching this Detol ad where the wife just washed her hands and the husband kisses her good bye before going to work and just before he leaves all of a sudden he feels the wife's hands and he falls back in love with her all over again, the music changes and he's in a dream land then all of a sudden snaps out of it. At the conclusion I thought wow.... Voodoo Soap, interesting pitch.
It really doesn't matter how much technology grows, marketers stick to this funny little formula that really fails more then it succeeds, however, when it does succeed WOW the effects can be tremendous. How many lack lusting ads are our there vs the 2 - 3 really good ones.
I was putting together a sort of "on-the-side" project basically seeing if I could setup my own Web Hosting biz, Cloud Services, PaaS, Zimbra a few other bits and pieces.
Naturally I was enticed to use Google AdWords for promo. Got myself a $75 (or $50 voucher whatever) had an Google employed Indian call me to setup the account for free. All very good service. Until the ads started going.
My MAIN competitor in the cloud computing space, IBM, Amazon, these all go without saying but the real pain was Google Business Apps, not only were they no1 for most clicks but to compete it was something ludicrous like $12 per click!
Google doesn't deserve a 10% revenue reduction but it does deserve a big bitch slap, they should be fined and be forced to remove their OWN ads off their OWN ad service, or at the very least be fair about it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Their little cat fight with Samsung put a dent in those margins and the more enemies Apple make the less those margins will be. The figures according to Bloomberg are .... (Apple vs Samsung here).
AAPL
23% Q4 (2011)
28% Q1 (2012)
29% Q2 (2012)
22% Q3 (2012)
005930:KS (Samsung)
7% Q4 (2011)
8% Q1 (2012)
10% Q2 (2012)
12% Q3 (2012)
Now, I was told this could be an annual thing, I.E due to the product launch and margins suffer due to the costs of the launch, though I feel that's not correct because the product's price is always higher during the initial launch and then reduce as product ages in the market.
With some of the productivity issues faced and the margins on components getting slammed (i.e Samsung's recent price hike on apple components) these figures could be a continued trend.
What I like about the trend for Samsung is that it's showing solid steady growth (half of what Apple is doing but it's steady). Apple's just seem overly chaotic which for analysts would worry them a little.
Funny story about Telstra. Wife called them up concerned that she couldn't find the latest Twilight movie on TBox. Sufficed to say the "accented man" Filipino / Indian guy gave her a bittorrent address and told her she can download the movie from there :)
Its not about learning it's about putting those resources to good use. How long did it take for the guys down the street to build the local shopping centre? times it by i don't know 100 and then you'll have an idea of what it may take to get the job done.
Saying that you're moving is all well and good, having the intention of moving is good also, but doing it is an entirely different creature.
Take the minerals trade for instance, it isn't a matter of one day going, okay lets dig holes and export this stuff. Training a fleet alone will take 6+ months, the preparation of training probably 6 months as well. Picking the right machinery, building the right infrastructure, approval for such infrastructure and the red tape associated. On and on and on ... and wait to get sued by someone that will slow you down in the entire process (or the million other possible things that could go wrong).
The US has the brains and the brawn, it simply doesn't have a magic time machine which is what's missing. And on a final note, we're talking about the tech industry, it moves to fast, that's the key issue here.
Nice to think they will be hiring herebut still a fascinating insult to U.S. manufacturing prowess, dontcha think – the idea that actually making Apple products is a little too complicated for Americans to handle
I don't agree with that statement, it has nothing to do with insulting the US, rather it's all about product control.
If you look at the way the game is played it's simple. America bombs Arabs to control oil production. America can't bomb Asia, truth of the matter is America would love to have production things like iPhones. The manufacturing countries/companies out of Asia though love to splash horrible working conditions and pin buying an iPhone worse then buying blood diamonds though what it boils down to is that "they are in charge".
Moving manufacturing back to the US has to be done by the vendors themselves, the process would take the better part of 10 years to get right in the meantime. That sweltering bank account Apple has, might be used for that, though it wont buy the time back Apple will lose to catch back up in the market to do so, You're basically telling your investors that you cant produce a worthy product till 2017+
I get the angst being a tech myself I really do. My impressions of Microsoft however are not that cynical and I'll tell you why.
- Apple is the king of product placement. Yet suffer when it comes to competition entering their markets.
- Google is the king of taking OSS and wrapping smart business models around them.
- Microsoft is the thief, they either acquire or "establish" a strategic partnership and then assimilate.
I feel that though the MS regime has been subsided, however, they are a stable stock and are active within "most" if not pretty much all computing circles. The model they adhere to is still well in motion. The GFC may of assisted in slowing it down and Balmer's rookie like aptitude to position of CEO may of swelled some fundamental short comings of his own (and the company as a whole) but they seem to be moving on from the GFC and Balmer has had about 10 years in the role (just a rough guess).
Apple suffers from the same aptitude problem at the moment. If you look at the CEO of Apple there is maybe 4 people on this planet (1 that is no longer) that have similar resumes as Tim Cook's, that is Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Page.
We have to consider Cook who is now the rookie out of these people and this position as being "too big for his boots". I'd say Cook is starting to show Balmer like traits and I'd consider much of what has done recently with the Maps, etc and then the axing of the iOS product guys a perfect display of this.
Skype, Surface, Xbox, now a phone, Windows 8, maps, office, voice recognition, skydive, etc etc.
They hold many cards old Microsoft, now that they've starting to tie all these components into a single working organism, along side the sinking share price of Apple. The battlegrounds have been set and this is the first move of Microsoft's new borgification.
What is going to happen is this, we're going to start seeing consolidated product offerings of this calibre which will be focused in reshaping the lounge room, the office, the kids bedroom, the parents bedroom, they've only really left out the kitchen (maybe we'll see Sink OS at some point).
Please tell me amongst the FOSS lovers and Apple punces that dwell on this board that there's someone else out there can see what this minor but well placed move has done? Again, I'm not here to endorse any of this (as people keep thinking i do) I'm just using my own vision and personal experience to draw this conclusion.
MS has made poor moves in the past few years, yet for every poor move one could say it was a strategy to end up at this turning point.
They did this at the perfect time, they've allowed the Skype customer base to become comfortable with their new overlords and now the turn the dark side has become complete!
As for Facebook and it ties with Skype, I'd be very worried about what data gets shared between the two, in fact who in their right mind would of allowed such a partnership to take place ... wait wait ... yes Facebook's run by Mark Z ... I bet he didn't see this coming, so what now? slap a photo gallery app on the side of Skype and you have a better version of Facebook? Hows that 15 or so year "shelf life" on Facebook's platform looking now investors ? :)
The same camera connection kit that has voltage issues that only reads specific files, the same camera connection kit that needs voltage hacks implemented to do anything useful with.
Yeah dumb ass why aren't you using the camera connection kit!
ARGHHHH!! Talk about misinformation here.
This is what I keep telling people WinRT _DOES_ have desktop mode, this is whole point to my argument. Also during the Surface keynote they were demoing Adobe Photoshop (most likely faked though) on Windows RT.
Now, if you look at it is still quite infant and somewhat restricted (as it only runs ms apps now) but this one feature alone paves the future of tablet computing IMHO.
I'm not sure if you're understanding what I'm saying. Let me break this down. I'm not endorsing Microsoft or Surface. What I'm saying is the Surface has benchmarked the next few years of tablet computing.
What has Microsoft done? well they've taken a very agile piece of technology that they didn't invent (which mind you has been around for ages waiting for something like this). I.E ARM* and they have used it too fill a market gap, which is the gap between Tablet to PC.
It's really up to the rest of the industry to refine it. Apple has to go back to the drawing board for this as well. So the question for the now is "Can Apple provide a merged platform of iOS and Lion as one system?" stick it on the iPad and compete with what Surface has done? The answer as far as I can see is no, and saying people wont want it as a feature is just dickheaded, damn yes people want it, it's an important part of mobile computing growth, Its about as important as what Doom was to Wolf3D IMHO.
Android which I have to say being a Linux user through on through, will not be able to touch this market with a 10ft pole. It's sad but true nonetheless.
* Please leave any vague references out of the conversation, this is now this is what's in the press at the moment.
People do care.
Okay lets say they do ...
Average users as they want something that looks cool
Stop right there the Apple UI hasn't changed since System 7 you can't tell me black on white is _that_ cool.
that their friends use and has all the cool apps they are familiar with.
Like YouTube and Google maps? Couldn't agree more.
I spoke to a phone salesmen and he told me Nokia has the highest returns in his store. The Nokia luima actually and didn't recommend it!
I spoke to a salesperson today aswell, see I wanted a tablet for my wife so she could plug it in to her (i think olympus) camera and then upload her photos to DropBox. The guy told me come back in a few weeks when the Windows tablets are in. He also said that it was something the iPad isn't capable of, which really I'd consider is a pretty damn remedial task.
In closing, Apple was a fashionable brand like Gucci. Nokia IS a fashionable, not in the US of course but it sells well everywhere else. I'd wage half the Apple consumer market if not more wouldn't even know what version iOS they run, in short, no they don't, only Geeks do, its our job too.
As for Elopp, yes he's right, just as the concept that Surface has a "Zune like future" as most people say but Surface has done its job already. It's over benched Apple in the tablet arena and given steam to rest of the market to see and know what to do with a particular market space. MS knows this and now will do it for the phone market.
He's right and the truth of the matter is with the exception of Acer who has basically signed its own death warrant by not consigning to windows will be suddenly left in the cold. Push vendors to create competitive devices by brandishing your own is a good strategy.
Sorry guys, nobody cares what OS is on a phone. Only Geeks do and normal people will by Nokia because its a good brand and if half the devices out there run the same system (like what surface+windows8 is doing) users will just buy it without a care to what a tech review has to say.
Nokia phones rock, they are even better with an OS like WP on it, I really do hate Microsoft with a passion but I cannot knock what they've done with WP7 and the Luima 900. Upon using a Nokia phone you get one important thing you miss with the iPhone, that is its a phone, not a handheld computer with a gsm module tacked on to it which even after all these years is what the iPhone still looks and feels like.
Year: Total Assets VS Total Liabilities
2008-12-31: 8,314.00 vs 5,642.00 (67.86%)
2009-12-31: 13,813.00 vs 8,556.00 (61.94%)
2010-12-31: 18,797.00 vs 11,933.00 (63.48%)
2011-12-31: 25,278.00 vs 17,521.00 (69.31%)
Problem seems pretty straight forward from here and considering that some of the assets which include very little long term items. Goodwill factoring in 2bn of that 25bn and most of their assets are server farms and property you have to consider and without doing any deeper checks it's current liabilities are not too bad against prior years.
This isn't a sign of a company "growing" because they have very little or NO _long term_ items. This is all short term stuff is quickly depreciable and the bigger the company gets the bigger the liabilities. 7% slump is a lot over 12 months, it's enough to scare people.
I may not be a finance expert as you said but I know how to run a business and I know i wouldn't allow such a basic level of business mechanics fail so easily and allow it to continue to fail for a while 12 months. Something is wrong and they aren't fixing it.
If you're going to play the "I know about stocks better than you" card I suggest you look at Amazon's balance sheet, they're doomed unless they can fix the business. All Amazon is doing now is juggling the expenditure vs income to make itself look better in the eyes of investors but they are not fixing core issues.
Check the balance sheet, check its history and u can see the grave being dug deeper and deeper ...
See what many don't get is IT pros around the would don't like their trade being categorised so easily. What "cloud" is doing is quantifying these layers.
Quantifying the layer simplifies it. If something technical becomes simple then business-heads can understand it (end-to-end) and then what happens is bushiness people do what business people do, that is begin to remove the layer, streamline the layer, outsource the layer, etc. Cloud stops what used to be quite complex thing from being a long laborious costly component to business and quantifies it in a neat little bundle ANNNND when you do that and you can remove / downgrade / retrench the people you need to run it.
IT pros hate it cloud because it gets IT pros fired, makes them less relevant, and less important.
Yeah, still not right. I'm sure Ford had the same discussions internally about Chevy at some point.
Patents and Patent Infringement are not about protecting / stealing ideas, they are about protecting / stealing the particular method of an idea. The rest IMHO is justifiable hogwash built to create "outs" for companies to sue one another. Patent law shouldn't be applicable to what colors are used, what shape things are. It's evident that the products differ it's also evident that they are the SAME product.
http://image.automobilemag.com/f/24741059+w750+st0/0909_04_z+chevy_camaro_vs_ford_mustang+engines.jpg
http://blogs.cars.com/putc_special_reports/images/2010v6so/Lead.jpg
http://image.hotrod.com/f/featuredvehicles/hrdp_1012_2010_chevrolet_camaro_vs_2010_ford_saleen_mustang/31149805+pheader_460x1000/hrdp_1012_01_o+2010_chevrolet_camaro_vs_2010_ford_saleen_mustang+front_view.jpg
From across the room can you tell the difference?
Wait! The trophy hasn't been passed on yet... wait until the trucks with the 5c pieces show up at Cupertino first!
HA! oh, had to laugh at this one.
That's rich. When will we see the day that poor old Linux gets put in the Apple vs MS argument, I mean really. Is it too much to ask Apple lovers to argue logically? Oh you dont like Apple you MUST like Microsoft instead!
Desktop market is gone to MS and that crown will remain for some time but if we are talking about PC's in people's pocket we seriously have to consider the 3 big players, Google, Apple, MS. Not just Apple vs MS. I'd actually say MS hasn't EVEN come to the party yet!
Did it occur that the GP was an Android fan?
I wont mention the fact that Apple's biggest industry is mobile pc and desktop where they own a only a little piece of the action. I just thought that point was inferred by the fact that the article was talking about a court case BETWEEN Apple and Samsung (Android) and NOT Microsoft (for a change :))
P/E is one way to value a company. Apple's price though dependant on P/E isn't the only ratio that's a factor. The P/E has slipped but its the stability of the business model which also employs Apple's desirability as a share price.
In essence, the good raving tech reviews, its retail presence and its commercial support all factor into the equation.
Tech reviews are slipping and it's not making expected analyst outcomes regarding sales, though it still has a tremendous way to go, in some ways the GP does have a point, even if he/she doesn't know the root of where that point lays.
The discussion of if Apple will gain a 1T marketcap has successfully been taken off the table and out of the reach of what considered a reality.
Not sure if I completely see what your saying making too much sense.
1bn users accessing a DB which, Yes, polls and manages a large amount of data, YES. However, you just slammed YouTube for doing pretty much the same thing but only exponentially better. Lets not forget massive amounts of comment management, video relevancy tools, algorithms that automatically scour video clips for copyright infringement and convert text to speech, etc so on an so fourth.
You bounced from the statement from " The complexity and joins of various database tables must be insane" to the statement "each of those 1 billion users has an entirely different set of friends from which recent (basically real-time) data must be polled - over, and over, and over again". That last statement contracts your comparison to YT.
Now for my take on it, what Facebook does, it does badly, if their search tool; their ad placement engines; their "3.74" degrees of separation algorithm, which LinkedIn does better than; all achieved say a Google level implementation of similar feature sets then I would tend to agree with you, it doesn't, it's half the reason why the company is fumbling as it cant do these things at a level that makes sense to the end user many times. My wife had Russian Bride ads show up in her FB photo gallery last night, WTF?
Also lets not mention that the most laborious parts of Facebook I.E their Maps and translation services are run primarily through Bing / Microsoft and the rest of their intensive services such as games are done off their platform and done via their API.
The difference between MS and Apple these days?
- MS sells shit products for a low low price
- Apple sells shit products for a ridiculously marked up price.
Apple is now just like any other tech brand, farm components off to the lowest bidder and worry about the PR nightmare later. Thanks Tim Cook.
This is what happens when you entrust a multi-billion dollar company to a bean counter, not a visionary.
I'm sorry stop you right there, you're trying to tell me Marketers are smart? scientific, calculated individuals with the capacity to introduce intelligence into their the daily work/life?
Sorry, not buying it, most Marketers I know are flaming idiots that live by an archaic formula of easy is good, complex is bad and if it's complex bury your head in the sand until is passes, then live life when everything is easy all over again.
Just me I could be wrong.
One of those situations where I haven't used a term or phrase all that often and trusted the spell checker a bit too much without proofing, sorry.
You joke but the funny thing I find is the power of advertising. I remember watching this Detol ad where the wife just washed her hands and the husband kisses her good bye before going to work and just before he leaves all of a sudden he feels the wife's hands and he falls back in love with her all over again, the music changes and he's in a dream land then all of a sudden snaps out of it. At the conclusion I thought wow .... Voodoo Soap, interesting pitch.
It really doesn't matter how much technology grows, marketers stick to this funny little formula that really fails more then it succeeds, however, when it does succeed WOW the effects can be tremendous. How many lack lusting ads are our there vs the 2 - 3 really good ones.
It's worse than that!
I was putting together a sort of "on-the-side" project basically seeing if I could setup my own Web Hosting biz, Cloud Services, PaaS, Zimbra a few other bits and pieces.
Naturally I was enticed to use Google AdWords for promo. Got myself a $75 (or $50 voucher whatever) had an Google employed Indian call me to setup the account for free. All very good service. Until the ads started going.
My MAIN competitor in the cloud computing space, IBM, Amazon, these all go without saying but the real pain was Google Business Apps, not only were they no1 for most clicks but to compete it was something ludicrous like $12 per click!
Google doesn't deserve a 10% revenue reduction but it does deserve a big bitch slap, they should be fined and be forced to remove their OWN ads off their OWN ad service, or at the very least be fair about it all.
Speaking as an appliance seller iPads can be used as tools, provided the functions are light and not laborious and the interface is built for iPads.