It's insane profit matched by insane operating cost, which remained the same as Q before. The reason why investors would be scared of that is because it raises a lot of curious questions.
Did Apple manufacture devices that are not leaving shelves? To say that people are waiting for the iPhone is a bad thing for a few reasons. A) most people want their new phone today, they are on a contract and if the sales person wants the sale he'll / she'll peddle any product B) The competition offer the end user the same thing (for better or worse by only a fraction) if having to wait for something that may or may not be better raises the care factor. I.E what has iPhone really got to offer that puts it above their competitors? Not much get the Android today because its here today.
The iPhone 5 launch will get the die hard Apple lovers to go out and buy the thing and it will be certianly true that carriers will put the new iPhone on the bestseller lists for a few months but all in all this lacking trend will be more constant over the term of the year / 2 years until the iPhone 6 comes out.
Unless a Apple can find a product that can match the iPad's impact on the market that market cap will start to sink. Apple historically sux at competing feature by feature with its competitors, it is good at defining market spaces, industry changing market spaces, they need to keep doing that.
I won't get into the retina argument I'll just say I had both devices, the Nokia works great in broad daylight, I live in a very hot sunny part of the world and it's the case that with other phones unless you boost its brightness to max you're having to dart under shade to use it where still in many cases it suffers. I was blown away on default setting on the Lumia I was walking down the street midday seeing everything clearly and could operate it but that's just an experience I've had.
See I want to argue your point on the feature balance. In many ways yes, you're right, Eg Apple media devices, laptops, desktops but with the iPhone it's not, it's the exact opposite, it's always about how much more you're getting with the iPhone and really it's not true it's not the case. It's as if when Apple makes a less specced product it's because the product is better balanced as you say, when it's over specced from the competition it's how superior they are. In critic world they get the cake and they eat it.
See I hear this all the time about how WP7 falls short. I've had iPhones for years, then Android, then Lumia and what your saying mirrors 90% of the critics out there.
I have not found a single thing, not one, my iPhone did that the Lumia can't. It's app range meets the AppStore in quality but not in quantity. For example, Astronomy Apps WP7 has all the ported apps I need and the same with Cartography Apps, again ported. Netbanks, Pizza delivery apps, all there. The 10 versions of the same app isn't but that's what i find good about it vs the AppStore as it's becoming cluttered with crap. I've been using WP7 for I think 2 months now with no complaints.
Speaking of Android, now that's a platform that outs both of them. A good example of that is Wifi Hotspotting in the phone, Android added it causing Apple to respond. Android is cram packed full of features, maybe a bit of overkill for just a phone, who knows, but the Android system on individual features out pace any other phone on the market. Doesn't make it a better phone IMHO it just makes it a more versatile system moving forward.
As for your statement on Nokia adding Android, it is every nerds dream really:) I would opt up for it over what I currently use but to say about the concept that WP7 is unworthy to compete, that's just critic FUD IMHO.
On a footnote about features, iOS 6 boasts its own mapping and driving app, this is sooo a rip from Nokia Drive.
I don't blame them though the nasty job critics do these days is really sickening.
I'm not sure what is with the trend to simply side with every and any Apple product and then have the competition try to create a iDevice "killer", then afterwards, 10 out of 10 times side with the iDevice in closing summary.
I mean the Nokia Lumia which is a great phone got shocking reviews for no real reason other than the fact its fashionable to trash Microsoft. Android devices left right getting the beat down, not factoring in price or purpose.
It's about time the critics stop it with this instant pro-Apple mantra and see devices for their differences rather than some half backed comparison.
For example retina performs poorly in direct sunlight and that many products out there have created solutions that perform better in the sunlight because that's what people want, or a critic complaining about 800px res on a phone vs 900px? What on a phone? A little handheld device that only sucks extra battery juice because of the extra pixels with no real world practical advantage...
It's good that there is some accountability with the comments and users being able to pull the footing out of under these critics sometimes. I remember seeing a Siri vs Tellme YouTube clip, where the reviewer didn't follow the regime of the Tellme interface and used phrases known to work on Siri. There was a huge backlash about it as it was unfairly compared and instead of retracting clip the idiot reviewer got back on YouTube and tried to justify his behavior, which only made him look like even more of a dick and further served to discredit him...
You're right about the privacy thing but really what a.... how do I say this... proverbial wankery fest...
I'm trying to picture how this WallMart + Facebook meeting would take place and what would fuel more than what a 10 min phone call wouldn't achieve.
"Hi Facebook we suck online can you help" "Yes we can set you up with some online ads"
I mean how else is FB going to help? FB doesn't sell stuff they are not eBay, FB doesn't manage personal web solutions millions of businesses out there that can do that, FB doesn't handle payment solutions, system security or do a very good job in the mobile market. So how valuable is this data? Is the like button doing this? How proven/convertible is it?
So what in the worldly fuck will FB do other than sell people's personal data through marketing strategies? We've seen similar with the FB+GM agreement, so how much is this data really worth? Will it substantiate the colossal market cap this company has?
What I ascertain from your post is that you struggle to use an OS of any real capability. Only use the net to browse Facebook and check your bank account, please don't install anything else on your shiny Mac incase shits itself.
What I found from MacOS is iTunes, QuickTime, Safari (oh this pain) run like shit. Screensaver was buggy and caused response issues. My 'use' of the system was nothing more than taking it out of the box and using the above programs. Since it's a Mac most of the popular software out there is unsupported so I was pretty hard pressed to find anything of any use to run on it.
What's even more surprising is the FPU work being done with custom compiles of Android code, If they get a Gentoo style Android solution cranking and reinvent the old adage of creating efficient code under the handheld industry it's future is looking quite bright.
I'm already expecting this to be marked troll because I haven't said anything nice about Apple. I haven't said anything bad either, I've just inferred that Android is better and done so without being AC, so go on mark me down... I LIKE IT!!!
You really don't get the internet do you? not only does it breed this type of behaviour but news and blog sites love to publish sensational drivel about it.
BTW,/., user's were complaining about how crap you've become lately when you posted about the iOS AppStore hack, I sided with you on posting it thinking they were wrong.... this article however just made me eat my own words. Thanks!
Want to reach the hacking culture? It's like hiring tribes people to help log the Amazon rainforest. Corporations should learn from the mistakes made in those senarios before even thinking of strategies such as this.
The irony here is although the Govt started the Internet as an official project, it has always rested on the shoulders of academics and the talent of the hacking community, corporations come further down the list.
Apple has changed fuck nothing of the mobile phone market, when I go to a cell carrier for a phone I get a handset it has a monthly fee attached to it which I pay over X months. If iPhone's didn't exist today I would still be doing that, it's been like that since I was an early teen and lots of people bought them back then as they do now. The iPhone "took over" the phone market, but so did Nokia, Gee I remember when Nokia was the phone to have, funny. Rebok and Nike all over again if you ask me!
Apple popularised the mobile app market and to say that the use of the mobile internet (3G) was a market of their doing is not accurate either because that requires tech from the cell carriers, i.e Apple may of supported technology that made mobile friendly websites but it was on the shoulders of everything else around them that created more of a right time / right place scenario. If you think I'm wrong about that consider Facetime as prime example of an Apple fuelled failure because that did happen at the wrong time / place.
It is arguable that they created the tablet market because of the fact that tablets existed prior but it's the closest to a "market creation" your going to get, why? because, would people 5 years ago by tablets? no wasn't widely accepted by mainstream, so yes its arguable that Apple created the iPad market I can give you that.
The iPhone has plenty of rivals and Apple is loosing too them just because of what Hazydave said in hist post.
And controlled by powerful cellular telecom companies, whereas tablets are free of that.
Which is why Android gets all the attention why they its not important which product is better. Apple's control measures are unsavoury to cell companies, Android isn't, they can create their own custom images if they wish and do what they like with it.
Think about iPhone and Skype and what happened there and how that affected cell companies, "giving people free phone calls , your a madmad!" thought the cell companies. Also think about Microsoft purchasing Skype and working with Nokia no coincidence there right. Depending on how palms are greased you'll see carriers simply becoming ISPS at the hands of MS and Android. Apple's future in the Phone industry is not looking so good now is it?
As for the iPad. I'll be the first to say it, as much as I hate Apple as a brand, the UI design even their logo I hate with a blind passion and dont go on about how great a brand it is, Apple a fruit, NOOOO fucking relevance to computers all right!! As a product it does have great momentum behind it and is the only thing on the market that separates Apple from the rest of them and if that goes, so does the room for growth (or at least until they invent something new and cool, which they wont cause they've lost the one guy who did that for them).
Rigggggghhhht.... See I look at it differently, having to tweak a system to keep to it running smoothly just shows poor architecture and substantiates IT people to keep their jobs. Cleaning registries and removing old programs isn't the world most complex task.
I also don't see it as coincidence that MacOS or Windows both being commercial products clog up after time and is usually proportial to the amount of shit you install on the system yet the free OS (linux) I download off the web which I've been using for the past 5 years with constant updates on the same hardware hasn't got a problem.
The best way to recondition a box, install Linux, or FreeBSD, easy and proven.
I'd challenge that only because a person being a public servant or being in a position of power doesn't necessarily make them a smart person.
I mean let's look at it this way, if I cry poor and I'm big business that suffers because of X and if X has political relevance to a particular political party, I.E Republican is right wing and X helps big business then yes, they believe what they are doing is correct by their views.
As if I'm a farmer and the guy across the road is selling unvaccinated chickens or using illegal aliens as employees and if it was the Democrats in power, I don't know, shutting down that farm would hold political relevance and if there wasn't a policy out there then me getting local congress to deal with the issue would be favorable for their political motivation and easier to leverage.
I'm not all up with the US political structure so if I have it wrong then sorry but you get what I mean.
It's really what's wrong with politics IMHO because I like to see the law / political system very similar to a computer program "if this then that else the other" and because it upholds this static behavior it's why laws that may be ethical and good in one end of town, kills and destroys the other.
If piracy was about real damages and not made up damages because the law allows flashy lawyers to substantiate a lot of bogus costs and damages against piracy or pirates, then we wouldn't have this ethical haze of which your refer too.
If I pirated a video and the RRP of that video was $10 and I was caught doing so and some media company wanted to take me to court over the cost of the stolen goods, then the damage is $10 and I would be liable to pay the media company $10. This doesn't seem work in the favor of the media company because it seems like an awful lot of work for just $10 so then they go after all the substantiated costs and thereabouts, why? because the law let's them, why because of legal precedence established within the civil court system.
We wont touch on criminal implications because that's prolly even more complex but this concept or precedence did hold ethical purpose at one point and therefore was written into law, the backlash being that it can be leveraged unethically at any point.
Same thing which I believe caused the GFC. In 1932 saw a depression, then the world recovered, as a result we wrote laws to prevent it from happening again. Then this legal precedence process repeated itself, undid the knots we imposed on ourselves and presto 2009 and we are back at stage 1 again. Now we are just in bandaid mode, patching the holes thinking that we're smart enough to out patch the problem (back to the software analogy) but the truth is it won't work out that way, sometime at some point the real value of the dollar has to find itself, when it does it's gonna hurt.
Name your reason, kiddy porn, hacking, illegal downloads, so on and so fourth.
Polticans will think they are doing the world/country justice trying to eliminate one of the above problems, they put forward a policy until its very many faults are examined and it's abandoned.
Another policitican comes along, thinks they are doing the world/country a justice trying to eliminate one of the above problems, except for the last one cause that's still in the news, they put forward a policy until its very many faults are examined and it's abandoned.
IT spending would be reduced in preparation to the election because people in govt jobs would be concerned for their own jobs. Plus spending on anything big would be put off until after the election incase a new govt is put in place, the old govt wouldn't want the new govt to get the kudos on anything good and anything bad can easily be blamed on the past govt decision
Good point! And if I had any say the answer would be no:) yeah in the corporate sector you'll still see 3 4 million dollar rollouts. Also recently I've seen a few govt traders won based on shareepoint.
You're not factoring OPEX / CAPEX buying cycles for a lot of that jumping around. You'll notice no real dips with Apple which is consumer based appliances doesn't have to worry about how businesses buy technology.
When you're MS and can sell a copy of SharePoint at 65K a licence their corporate sales team wont give a flaming rats ass about selling 65 handsets @ 1k which make less markup and more overhead.
That damage isn't Apple your seeing at the end of 2011, that's more to do with cloud and the impacts of competing products in that sector such as Google Apps vs Exchange, MS as a result shifted to using their new assurance program to solve that issue, it has a result assisted in asset based cloud purchasing which they couldn't offer until the assurance program kicked in.
Slashdot Mirror
It's insane profit matched by insane operating cost, which remained the same as Q before. The reason why investors would be scared of that is because it raises a lot of curious questions.
Did Apple manufacture devices that are not leaving shelves? To say that people are waiting for the iPhone is a bad thing for a few reasons. A) most people want their new phone today, they are on a contract and if the sales person wants the sale he'll / she'll peddle any product B) The competition offer the end user the same thing (for better or worse by only a fraction) if having to wait for something that may or may not be better raises the care factor. I.E what has iPhone really got to offer that puts it above their competitors? Not much get the Android today because its here today.
The iPhone 5 launch will get the die hard Apple lovers to go out and buy the thing and it will be certianly true that carriers will put the new iPhone on the bestseller lists for a few months but all in all this lacking trend will be more constant over the term of the year / 2 years until the iPhone 6 comes out.
Unless a Apple can find a product that can match the iPad's impact on the market that market cap will start to sink. Apple historically sux at competing feature by feature with its competitors, it is good at defining market spaces, industry changing market spaces, they need to keep doing that.
I won't get into the retina argument I'll just say I had both devices, the Nokia works great in broad daylight, I live in a very hot sunny part of the world and it's the case that with other phones unless you boost its brightness to max you're having to dart under shade to use it where still in many cases it suffers. I was blown away on default setting on the Lumia I was walking down the street midday seeing everything clearly and could operate it but that's just an experience I've had.
See I want to argue your point on the feature balance. In many ways yes, you're right, Eg Apple media devices, laptops, desktops but with the iPhone it's not, it's the exact opposite, it's always about how much more you're getting with the iPhone and really it's not true it's not the case. It's as if when Apple makes a less specced product it's because the product is better balanced as you say, when it's over specced from the competition it's how superior they are. In critic world they get the cake and they eat it.
See I hear this all the time about how WP7 falls short. I've had iPhones for years, then Android, then Lumia and what your saying mirrors 90% of the critics out there.
I have not found a single thing, not one, my iPhone did that the Lumia can't. It's app range meets the AppStore in quality but not in quantity. For example, Astronomy Apps WP7 has all the ported apps I need and the same with Cartography Apps, again ported. Netbanks, Pizza delivery apps, all there. The 10 versions of the same app isn't but that's what i find good about it vs the AppStore as it's becoming cluttered with crap. I've been using WP7 for I think 2 months now with no complaints.
Speaking of Android, now that's a platform that outs both of them. A good example of that is Wifi Hotspotting in the phone, Android added it causing Apple to respond. Android is cram packed full of features, maybe a bit of overkill for just a phone, who knows, but the Android system on individual features out pace any other phone on the market. Doesn't make it a better phone IMHO it just makes it a more versatile system moving forward.
As for your statement on Nokia adding Android, it is every nerds dream really :) I would opt up for it over what I currently use but to say about the concept that WP7 is unworthy to compete, that's just critic FUD IMHO.
On a footnote about features, iOS 6 boasts its own mapping and driving app, this is sooo a rip from Nokia Drive.
I don't blame them though the nasty job critics do these days is really sickening.
I'm not sure what is with the trend to simply side with every and any Apple product and then have the competition try to create a iDevice "killer", then afterwards, 10 out of 10 times side with the iDevice in closing summary.
I mean the Nokia Lumia which is a great phone got shocking reviews for no real reason other than the fact its fashionable to trash Microsoft. Android devices left right getting the beat down, not factoring in price or purpose.
It's about time the critics stop it with this instant pro-Apple mantra and see devices for their differences rather than some half backed comparison.
For example retina performs poorly in direct sunlight and that many products out there have created solutions that perform better in the sunlight because that's what people want, or a critic complaining about 800px res on a phone vs 900px? What on a phone? A little handheld device that only sucks extra battery juice because of the extra pixels with no real world practical advantage...
It's good that there is some accountability with the comments and users being able to pull the footing out of under these critics sometimes. I remember seeing a Siri vs Tellme YouTube clip, where the reviewer didn't follow the regime of the Tellme interface and used phrases known to work on Siri. There was a huge backlash about it as it was unfairly compared and instead of retracting clip the idiot reviewer got back on YouTube and tried to justify his behavior, which only made him look like even more of a dick and further served to discredit him...
Thats not a knife this is a knife
You're right about the privacy thing but really what a .... how do I say this ... proverbial wankery fest ...
I'm trying to picture how this WallMart + Facebook meeting would take place and what would fuel more than what a 10 min phone call wouldn't achieve.
"Hi Facebook we suck online can you help"
"Yes we can set you up with some online ads"
I mean how else is FB going to help? FB doesn't sell stuff they are not eBay, FB doesn't manage personal web solutions millions of businesses out there that can do that, FB doesn't handle payment solutions, system security or do a very good job in the mobile market. So how valuable is this data? Is the like button doing this? How proven/convertible is it?
So what in the worldly fuck will FB do other than sell people's personal data through marketing strategies? We've seen similar with the FB+GM agreement, so how much is this data really worth? Will it substantiate the colossal market cap this company has?
Mod parent up.
What I ascertain from your post is that you struggle to use an OS of any real capability. Only use the net to browse Facebook and check your bank account, please don't install anything else on your shiny Mac incase shits itself.
What I found from MacOS is iTunes, QuickTime, Safari (oh this pain) run like shit. Screensaver was buggy and caused response issues. My 'use' of the system was nothing more than taking it out of the box and using the above programs. Since it's a Mac most of the popular software out there is unsupported so I was pretty hard pressed to find anything of any use to run on it.
Hey don't you DARE classify me as an Apple Fanboi. Look at my post history WE ARE ON SAME SIDE!!! now holster you're side arm.
Either way, the joke was supposed to infer that anything Microsoft related was akin to BDSM.
Heh, i just realised BDSM is a palindrome from MSDB :) I wonder if that was on purpose LOL
What's even more surprising is the FPU work being done with custom compiles of Android code, If they get a Gentoo style Android solution cranking and reinvent the old adage of creating efficient code under the handheld industry it's future is looking quite bright.
I'm already expecting this to be marked troll because I haven't said anything nice about Apple. I haven't said anything bad either, I've just inferred that Android is better and done so without being AC, so go on mark me down ... I LIKE IT!!!
THATS IT IM CALLING THE COPS!
You really don't get the internet do you? not only does it breed this type of behaviour but news and blog sites love to publish sensational drivel about it.
BTW, /., user's were complaining about how crap you've become lately when you posted about the iOS AppStore hack, I sided with you on posting it thinking they were wrong.... this article however just made me eat my own words. Thanks!
Want to reach the hacking culture? It's like hiring tribes people to help log the Amazon rainforest. Corporations should learn from the mistakes made in those senarios before even thinking of strategies such as this.
The irony here is although the Govt started the Internet as an official project, it has always rested on the shoulders of academics and the talent of the hacking community, corporations come further down the list.
Apple has changed fuck nothing of the mobile phone market, when I go to a cell carrier for a phone I get a handset it has a monthly fee attached to it which I pay over X months. If iPhone's didn't exist today I would still be doing that, it's been like that since I was an early teen and lots of people bought them back then as they do now. The iPhone "took over" the phone market, but so did Nokia, Gee I remember when Nokia was the phone to have, funny. Rebok and Nike all over again if you ask me!
Apple popularised the mobile app market and to say that the use of the mobile internet (3G) was a market of their doing is not accurate either because that requires tech from the cell carriers, i.e Apple may of supported technology that made mobile friendly websites but it was on the shoulders of everything else around them that created more of a right time / right place scenario. If you think I'm wrong about that consider Facetime as prime example of an Apple fuelled failure because that did happen at the wrong time / place.
It is arguable that they created the tablet market because of the fact that tablets existed prior but it's the closest to a "market creation" your going to get, why? because, would people 5 years ago by tablets? no wasn't widely accepted by mainstream, so yes its arguable that Apple created the iPad market I can give you that.
prolly a better reference vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaBs2UH9WUc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRvPINrnwRs
The iPhone has plenty of rivals and Apple is loosing too them just because of what Hazydave said in hist post.
And controlled by powerful cellular telecom companies, whereas tablets are free of that.
Which is why Android gets all the attention why they its not important which product is better. Apple's control measures are unsavoury to cell companies, Android isn't, they can create their own custom images if they wish and do what they like with it.
Think about iPhone and Skype and what happened there and how that affected cell companies, "giving people free phone calls , your a madmad!" thought the cell companies. Also think about Microsoft purchasing Skype and working with Nokia no coincidence there right. Depending on how palms are greased you'll see carriers simply becoming ISPS at the hands of MS and Android. Apple's future in the Phone industry is not looking so good now is it?
As for the iPad. I'll be the first to say it, as much as I hate Apple as a brand, the UI design even their logo I hate with a blind passion and dont go on about how great a brand it is, Apple a fruit, NOOOO fucking relevance to computers all right!! As a product it does have great momentum behind it and is the only thing on the market that separates Apple from the rest of them and if that goes, so does the room for growth (or at least until they invent something new and cool, which they wont cause they've lost the one guy who did that for them).
Rigggggghhhht.... See I look at it differently, having to tweak a system to keep to it running smoothly just shows poor architecture and substantiates IT people to keep their jobs. Cleaning registries and removing old programs isn't the world most complex task.
I also don't see it as coincidence that MacOS or Windows both being commercial products clog up after time and is usually proportial to the amount of shit you install on the system yet the free OS (linux) I download off the web which I've been using for the past 5 years with constant updates on the same hardware hasn't got a problem.
The best way to recondition a box, install Linux, or FreeBSD, easy and proven.
I'd challenge that only because a person being a public servant or being in a position of power doesn't necessarily make them a smart person.
I mean let's look at it this way, if I cry poor and I'm big business that suffers because of X and if X has political relevance to a particular political party, I.E Republican is right wing and X helps big business then yes, they believe what they are doing is correct by their views.
As if I'm a farmer and the guy across the road is selling unvaccinated chickens or using illegal aliens as employees and if it was the Democrats in power, I don't know, shutting down that farm would hold political relevance and if there wasn't a policy out there then me getting local congress to deal with the issue would be favorable for their political motivation and easier to leverage.
I'm not all up with the US political structure so if I have it wrong then sorry but you get what I mean.
It's really what's wrong with politics IMHO because I like to see the law / political system very similar to a computer program "if this then that else the other" and because it upholds this static behavior it's why laws that may be ethical and good in one end of town, kills and destroys the other.
If piracy was about real damages and not made up damages because the law allows flashy lawyers to substantiate a lot of bogus costs and damages against piracy or pirates, then we wouldn't have this ethical haze of which your refer too.
If I pirated a video and the RRP of that video was $10 and I was caught doing so and some media company wanted to take me to court over the cost of the stolen goods, then the damage is $10 and I would be liable to pay the media company $10. This doesn't seem work in the favor of the media company because it seems like an awful lot of work for just $10 so then they go after all the substantiated costs and thereabouts, why? because the law let's them, why because of legal precedence established within the civil court system.
We wont touch on criminal implications because that's prolly even more complex but this concept or precedence did hold ethical purpose at one point and therefore was written into law, the backlash being that it can be leveraged unethically at any point.
Same thing which I believe caused the GFC. In 1932 saw a depression, then the world recovered, as a result we wrote laws to prevent it from happening again. Then this legal precedence process repeated itself, undid the knots we imposed on ourselves and presto 2009 and we are back at stage 1 again. Now we are just in bandaid mode, patching the holes thinking that we're smart enough to out patch the problem (back to the software analogy) but the truth is it won't work out that way, sometime at some point the real value of the dollar has to find itself, when it does it's gonna hurt.
Name your reason, kiddy porn, hacking, illegal downloads, so on and so fourth.
Polticans will think they are doing the world/country justice trying to eliminate one of the above problems, they put forward a policy until its very many faults are examined and it's abandoned.
Another policitican comes along, thinks they are doing the world/country a justice trying to eliminate one of the above problems, except for the last one cause that's still in the news, they put forward a policy until its very many faults are examined and it's abandoned.
Another politician comes along ........
IT spending would be reduced in preparation to the election because people in govt jobs would be concerned for their own jobs. Plus spending on anything big would be put off until after the election incase a new govt is put in place, the old govt wouldn't want the new govt to get the kudos on anything good and anything bad can easily be blamed on the past govt decision
Good point! And if I had any say the answer would be no :) yeah in the corporate sector you'll still see 3 4 million dollar rollouts. Also recently I've seen a few govt traders won based on shareepoint.
You're not factoring OPEX / CAPEX buying cycles for a lot of that jumping around. You'll notice no real dips with Apple which is consumer based appliances doesn't have to worry about how businesses buy technology.
When you're MS and can sell a copy of SharePoint at 65K a licence their corporate sales team wont give a flaming rats ass about selling 65 handsets @ 1k which make less markup and more overhead.
That damage isn't Apple your seeing at the end of 2011, that's more to do with cloud and the impacts of competing products in that sector such as Google Apps vs Exchange, MS as a result shifted to using their new assurance program to solve that issue, it has a result assisted in asset based cloud purchasing which they couldn't offer until the assurance program kicked in.