Thoughts Over 140 Characters

Can someone please tell financial analysts to shut the fuck up?

Leonid Kanopka, writing for Seeking Alpha in November, two months ago:

Apple is a great company with wonderful products, but its run is up. It seems to me that innovation is beginning to run dry, and the stock price is overinflated. The stock has begun to fall already dropping from its $426 high. If the economy does not pick up and the company does not cushion its freefall, we could see new lows into 2012 — maybe $85. Whatever the case, I see a rocky future and a new bubble about to burst. My recommendation: Sell.

Nailed it.

Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it.

Yep. So sad.

MG Siegler:

Remember back in October when after a rare “miss” by Apple (which was only a miss because analysts are stupid and lazy), the early signs pointed to the potential of a $40 billion quarter? Some thought that was insane given that Apple had never even had a $30 billion quarter before. Well, turns out that projection was a little insane — insanely low.

Try a $46.33 billion quarter.

It’s a number so insane that it even destroys the $42.76 billion blow-out “whisper” number.

As for the early projections of 34 million iPhones sold — which again, some people thought were crazy — also low. Try 37 million.

But hey, Android is winning, right?

As for the other numbers. 15.43 million iPads. A record. 5.2 million Macs. A record. 15.4 million iPods. Not a record, but no surprise — this is the age of the iPhone.

Net quarterly profit was $13.06 billion. Again, holy shit.

That stock you were an idiot for selling after aforementioned “miss”? Up 10% now in after-hours trading, well past $460 a share. By far an all-time high, pushing Apple’s market cap well past $400 billion. 

Apple now has $97.6 billion in cash.

I’ll be listening to the call at 2PM PT and posting some follow-up thoughts on TechCrunch. Stay tuned.

Yep, I guess the iPhone 4S was a huge disappointment and Apple is in trouble…

This is pretty sad. I remember owning my first Blackberry back in 2005. It was a Blackberry 8700g, and it was amazing. I had owned a number of Nokia phones before, and colleagues from other countries had recently started to get Blackberries for work. Whenever I saw how they could receive email in real time, I was completely amazed and jealous. When we finally got them I was instantly addicted. The 8700g had the then distinctive scroll wheel on the side which was the most revolutionary way to navigate a phone UI I had ever seen. I couldn’t stop using it, to the point that I quickly developed what was soon called Blackberry thumb.

The problem with RIM is not only that they failed to see how the iPhone was going to transform the mobile landscape in the coming years, but more importantly that their products today are basically the same they were 7 years ago. Sure, they replaced the scroll wheel on the side with a trackball on the front of the device, and later with a mini touchpad; their devices are faster and have better screen resolutions, better cameras, more capacity and added features (WiFi, GPS…); but they are essentially the same. The UI hasn’t changed much. Their attempts at a full touchscreen experience have failed dramatically. Their OS is so outdated that you still have to reboot the phone to install and uninstall applications (I mean, seriously?). Their only hope for a modern experience is Blackberry 10, but unfortunately that seems to be coming way too late and with too severe limitations.

Jonathan Geller, BGR:

For starters, RIM still can’t get BlackBerry Messenger working with more than one PIN on BlackBerry 10, and support for BES email will be replaced by ActiveSync going forward. That’s right — your corporate email, calendar and contacts will sync directly from a Microsoft Exchange server to your device.

This means RIM is completely giving up its software differentiation—BES and BBM are their main assets. How will the email experience be any better on a Blackberry smartphone than on any other smartphone in the market when they all use ActiveSync? How will the enterprise react to that, given that RIM’s biggest selling point is BES’s security and control? Why would any current Blackberry user upgrade to a new Blackberry device with a new Blackberry OS and give up on BBM?

At this point I have no hope of anything good coming out of RIM in the future. I believe they will eventually sell the company—though I’m not sure who would want it at this point—give up on their OS and technology and embrace either Android, Windows Phone 7 or webOS, or scrap their hardware and OS business and build BES clients for iOS, Android and other mobile operating systems. I believe the latter would be the best alternative for RIM.

However I don’t think RIM’s executives will ever acknowledge how deeply screwed they are. I can only agree with Marco Arment on his assessment of RIM’s current situation:

“Someone else can take it from here.”

Marco Arment:

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Unfortunately, this is true.

MG Siegler just nails it.

The truth is that the Internet, like all the other technologies before it, is a transformative tool that could scale the film industry to new heights (in terms of both popularity and profit). But such an end requires some work and some rethinking.

Namely, because the barriers to entry for distributing and accessing content have been significantly lowered, the prices should be lowered as well. But Hollywood doesn’t like that. Even though they were largely arbitrary to begin with, they have no desire to lower prices. If anything, they’d like to raise them.

And then again:

The iTunes model for music has proven that people will pay for content. You just have to make it as accessible as possible. That means both price and distribution points.