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Apple Building Cash Reserves for 'Big, Bold' Moves
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Apple's goal should be to make money for it's shareholders even if it means not working on the projects you want them to.
I like the satellite idea, always have. Then come out with the iSatphone. Every Apple device in the world, anywhere in the world, is suddenly connected. That is the killer app.
The majority of Nintendo shares are owned by Hiroshi Yamauchi and besides, Japan has laws to keep foreign companies out.
"Big, bold moves"?
Like affordable computers that have the same features and options available as cheap a** PCs? Think Different.
Like affordable computers that have the same features and options available as cheap a** PCs? Think Different.
Because in part Microsoft thinks its owners know how to spend/invest their money about as well as the corporate officers do. It is called a dividend.
Apple's execs thinks they are smarter than the owners so will spend the money "for them".
As with Microsoft, that is going to run out of steam. Once a double digit billion dollar company can put huge multiples on that in a consistent fashion. When each year start to require the GDP of a small country to get higher than "average" growth number that growth games sputters out and start having to hand the owners some of the profits.
There is enough product overlap with Apple that may turn into bigger DoJ issue for Apple than it would for Microsoft. Similarly Microsoft has a larger multi-platform port team than Apple does. Merging those could be more of a
synergy cost reduction .
That would emulating the bad road that Sony went down buying Columbia ( and getting into the music/movie business ). There is a conflict they'll set up both external and internal. The internal content business will want the other parts of the company to set up competitive barriers. The external conflict will either feed off of those or the perceived notion that they will pop up.
Being a retail merchant doesn't quite have the same effect. They sell all of the content providers stuff.
One contributing reason why Sony let the portable music player blow up on them in the "Walkman/Discman" transition to the "iPod" era was not solving the paid content problem in the way that Apple did. Part of Sony would have tried to kill iTunes ( when it was primarily a ripper. )
If Microsoft cut loose the Internet division tomorrow that would be glaringly obvious that it is not true at all.
Microsoft has had the same problem that Apple is beginning to encounter over 10 years ago. Finding something new to significantly grow off of.
Apple would probably buy Palm first. Palm's CEO is a former Apple VP, and they do have some sweet engineering talent that could be ported to Apple software.
Apple should then buy AMD, moving all chip manufacturing in house. That would be a good way to get into the x64 market and not be tied to Intel and their **** for graphics.
Apple should then buy AMD, moving all chip manufacturing in house. That would be a good way to get into the x64 market and not be tied to Intel and their **** for graphics.
1) Why buy the money-losing Palm instead of just hiring their good engineers?
2) AMD sucks (see above message). More importantly, AMD does not do their own chip manufacturing in house.
3) Even if they bought AMD (big mistake - see (2)) the x86 license would not transfer to Apple.
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So then why is the post that started this off-topicness with a spew of "CAPITALISM IS MERITOCRACY" robotic speech... still here?
Double-standard much?
Perfect fit. Not easy, but doable. Could REALLY speed up HTML5 with UTube and Hulu running a HTML5 beta.
By who? I guarantee that less than 15% of the country would buy (buy, not amorphous polling "want") a TV of even 48" unless they had a dedicated theater room in the house, which, of course, is an extremely distinct minority of the general population (the majority of whom have fewer bedrooms than household members... some of the people here need to get acquainted with demographics and stop thinking you are "average"... you might start with 2000 census demo maps).
Absurd. Thoroughly, embarrassingly absurd.
Ten years later, I can't believe people are still missing the point. No offense intended to you at all, even "analysts" get this one wrong.
Apple makes a pittance, relatively speaking, from iTMS. Nothing. Maybe less than nothing.
It's the $9.99 CDs at Best Buy. It's there as an incentive for you to buy iThing, where they have huge margins.
Apple couldn't *possibly*, possibly, in a million years care less about being "behind" at distribution of the content as long as someone is distributing it in a way that necessitates a device. Like, you know, Hulu, which will provide for free (free to Apple, maybe not to you) one of the #1 reasons for non-serious-techie folks to buy an iPad.
It's the same "wrong" that people fall prey to when they think that Apple's opposition to Flash is about forcing people to buy stuff through iTMS. Again, they couldn't possibly care less. In the big scheme of things, they make zero money from it. It's about wanting to make their hardware devices the absolutely, positively best option for the big middle of the bell curve that isn't bothered too much about configurability.
Margins on content delivery are less than zero. A thousand bankrupted companies, and zombies like AOL, testify to this. Without exception. Margins on non-commodity hardware (read: hardware coupled with usability in the software) are where all the money is.
Michael Dell had some choice remarks for Apple a few years ago, and now they could buy him and his firstborn without blinking-- but it's more fun to let him stay around as comic relief.
Compare sales of iPods, average size of music libraries, and iTMS drm-encumbered sales.
I'll save you the trouble and just tell you that you have NO idea at all, not the first iota, what you are talking about.
Do you really think that one single person ever said to themselves: "I'm going to go buy an iPod so I can fill it up with $12,000 worth of DRMed songs from the iTunes Music Store!!"
It's patently moronic on its face.
Apparently you are not in tech in big business. For what you said above to happen, Apple would need to:
1: Have cheaper hardware on the level of Dell or HP
2: Allow the OS on other hardware of the "big business" choosing
big business, as you say, does not want to spend allot on hardware, techs if the do need to. That is why you find more and more help desk in India and the Philippines. They want the flexabilty to use any hardware the choose. In fact, they don't even want desktop computers. The thing these days is VDI and virtualized applications.