reinharden

54 Comments

    • Web Browser Wars: Google Looking Beyond Market Share [view article]
      You left a few important points out.

      1) Chrome and Firefox are indeed open source; however, Chrome is built upon WebKit which is an open source tool strongly supported by Apple (it's the basis of Safari on the iPhone and under MacOS X). Assuming that all of Chrome is maintained in the open source arena, Apple will benefit relatively quickly. As Firefox doesn't use this software, their benefit will be less direct and immediate.

      2) Chrome is designed to slide right into Android. So Chrome is Google's Mobile web browser (akin to Apple's Safari on the iPhone). Obviously Apple wasn't likely to do something so potentially competitive with the iPhone and Google would be nowhere with a PhoneOS without a web browser.

      3) Google's line of web applications (Google Documents, gMail, Google Reader, etc) are currently hobbled by the absence of some key features in the web browsers. By providing an open source web browser that is optimized for enabling these web applications, Google is better able to compete with Microsoft's (and Apple's) more desktop centric application suite.

      In the final analysis, short of buying Opera, Google really had little choice but to develop their own web browser.

      reinharden       Sep 04 12:24 PM
    • Invest Cautiously for the Rest of 2008 [view article]
      One suspects that DELL's current problems have a lot more to do with DELL in particular than any other company. AAPL and HPQ and INTC all seem to be doing okay. STX is nearly supply constrained. And MSFT doesn't seem to be disappointing more than one would anticipate just due to Vista.

      While not growing as fast as we'd like, the computer side of the tech industry is still clearly growing.

      reinharden       Sep 03 10:16 AM
    • Why Is Google Entering the Browser Market? [view article]
      It's true that Google has been supplying much of Mozilla's funding though Firefox; however, it makes little sense for Google to "acquire" Mozilla the company. What would they actually be buying? The Firefox "product" is open source (and Google has already paid for it a thousand times over).

      And if Firefox / Mozilla / Netscape remnants were more useful, Google would have used that as the base of Chrome rather than the more Apple-based WebKit. And with Apple and now Google pouring resources into WebKit-based products for Windows, I suspect that Chrome and Safari will happily co-exist on Windows for at least a while longer.

      reinharden       Sep 02 01:13 PM
    • Steve Jobs: Honesty Is the Best Policy [view article]
      AAPL has to treat Steve Jobs' health as a private issue. As a matter of law, it is. While the federal legal obligations on Apple Inc. aren't entirely clear when it comes to discussing the health of an employee, California has more clear-cut laws on the issue.

      Steve Jobs can choose to discuss his health with people. Apple Inc., until such time as his health is a material fact, cannot initiate such disclosures.

      Also, it'd be mind-boggling stupid to get stuck in the never-ending loop of "What is the current state of Steve Jobs' health?"

      One, Steve Jobs can die at any time in any number of ways. If Apple Inc. claims he's healthy and he dies of an aneurysm or a heart attack or a stroke the next day, how many class action lawsuits will there be the day after that? Apple Inc. isn't a medical profession -- they can't affirm or deny his health.


      Once Steve Jobs goes on the record, the only way to control this issue would be to providing constant medical data with increasing amounts of information. For example, the treatment can affect one's immune system. How long before people want to know his white blood cell counts? Survivors often develop diabetes. How long before people want to know his blood sugar levels? Diet is believed to play a role in avoiding recurrence of problems? Will Steve Jobs have to issue a weekly menu? Will Apple have to disclose that Steve jobs had a steak dinner?

      The only reasonable and correct answer is "Steve Jobs' health is a private matter".

      reinharden       Jul 27 12:32 PM
    • Low Flash Memory Prices Pressure Chip Makers [view article]
      One suspects that with flash prices at all time lows and with overall demand practically non-existent, it might behoove AAPL to continue to buy flash on the spot market at these self-same new-all-time-low-price... every week rather than lock-in longer term, possibly higher prices.

      I'm just saying...


      And, if AAPL is unsure of their own demand, definitely better to stay on the spot market unless supplies start to look tight.

      Perversely, generally speaking, in the current market, the longer AAPL goes without entering into new contracts, the less their supplies will cost.

      reinharden       Mar 13 01:33 PM
    • SanDisk: Risk Down $3, Reward Up $30 [view article]
      > expand NAND demand by several orders of magnitude.

      > Our back-of-the-envelope math gets us roughly 4.5B GB
      > of incremental NAND demand in '09 versus 1 billion GB
      > shipped in '06 and about 2 billion GB shipped in '07.

      Um, going from 2 billion GB in 07 to even 6 billion GB in 09 would represent increasing demand by a factor of 3.

      An order of magnitude requires increasing demand by a factor of 10. Two orders of magnitude would be at least a factor of 100. Several orders of magnitude requires at least a factor of 1000...

      reinharden       Jan 17 12:07 PM
    • China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone [view article]
      I suppose to be fair I should note that you said China Unicom doesn't know GPRS. So that they have 100 million GSM subscribers might not be relevant.

      That having been said, China Unicom offers GPRS service in 250+ cities across China and claims that they'll have it enabled in "all" cities prior to the 2008 Olympics.

      Nearly all current GSM base stations are capable of supporting GPRS. For most GSM service providers, it's just a matter of logistics and provisioning...which are not admittedly not necessarily easy matters in the countryside.

      But I'm not convinced you were actually distinguishing between GPRS and GSM in your article since you were comparing to CDMA...

      reinharden       Jan 15 07:18 AM
    • China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone [view article]
      You might want to do some fact checking.

      China Unicom operates both a CDMA and a GSM system. They have 100M+ GSM subscribers and a substantially smaller number of CDMA subscribers.

      I didn't bother digging up the most recent numbers, but this article from the summer of 2006 discusses their GSM subscriber base reaching 100 million:
      www1.cei.gov.cn/ce/doc...

      Of course, that you're using phrases such as "The odorless-feces-factor&... pretty much makes it clear that objectivity and facts aren't really the goal of your article. So sorry if I've harshed your buzz by interjecting inconvenient and likely unwanted facts. ;-)

      reinharden       Jan 15 07:09 AM
    • Google Reader: Security By Obscurity? [view article]
      Um, not so much.

      Sharing worked before; however, you chose with whom you shared things.

      Google unilaterally changed the sharing model so that anything you had previously shared with a very small, self-selected group of people was instead shared with everyone who was in your Contacts list.

      Be they friends, family, or business contacts.

      Google would have been fine had they even simply warned people that the functionality was changing. Instead, they changed what it did and "publicly" revealed everything to everybody.

      I don't much care since I'd never "shared" anything using Google Reader (why would I want people to know what I was reading?)...but I certainly understand why people were angry when the functional model changed without warning.

      reinharden       Dec 27 02:08 PM
    • A Glimpse Into Apple’s Future [view article]
      > stayed pretty much the same for a good few years

      With the possible exception of, you know, changing out everything that was on the inside of the box?

      The first Intel iMac shipped in January, 2006.

      Yeah, it might be worth tweaking the products now that the Intel transition is truly done. But AAPL did quite a lot of work to make those boxes look like they hadn't changed.

      reinharden       Dec 15 05:16 PM
    • Employees Determine iPhone Success in Business [view article]
      One note with regards to Exchange support for email: Exchange Server supports IMAP and a preponderance of large corporate sites even have it enabled. But not all sites do and there's lots of FUD about enabling IMAP being "insecure"..... so, it works fine with Exchange via IMAP.

      That doesn't give one the full functionality of Exchange, but I think it's important to recognize where the lines really are whether than where the media says the lines are.

      reinharden       Dec 09 09:43 PM
    • Motorola CEO Ed Zander Steps Down [view article]
      They don't need phones with more feature, they need phones that work better.

      After trying several Motorola phones, my girlfriend now cringes at the mention of the word Motorola. She really liked the appearance of the RAZR but found using it appallingly bad. I can't say that I disagree.

      I use to love MOT phones because they worked well without getting in your way. Now MOT, NOK, and Samsung have gone insane with adding features, but making it hard to get to even the simple things without having to read the manual.

      I'm not even sure whether or not the iPhone had a manual...

      reinharden       Nov 30 03:36 PM
    • Google Mobile: Winners and Losers [view article]
      Let's not forget Symbian (and by extension the owners of Symbian).
      04.5% - Samsung
      08.4% - Siemens
      10.5% - Panasonic
      13.1% - Sony Ericsson
      15.6% - Ericsson
      47.9% - Nokia
      Their investments in Symbian have arguably decreased in value due to the gPhone consortia.

      UIQ and the various companies that invested in UIQ similarly are definitely square in the sights of the gPhone.


      There's no doubt that Windows Mobile / Windows CE / whatever the other Windows-based phone OS's are are losers in the sense that they'll be negatively impacted. But it's definitely not clear whether or not they're losers in the sense that they've lost. So I agree that this has yet to be determined.

      reinharden       Nov 26 11:33 PM
    • 10 Reasons Why Apple Should Acquire AMD [view article]
      You do remember AIM, don't you?

      Partnering with the second tier silicon vendors at the time (IBM and Motorola) didn't really work out all that well. Why on earth would Apple want to partner with what is really the third or fourth tier silicon company?

      Vertical integration doesn't work very well in the computer industry. IBM and Motorola have demonstrated that by their moves to abandon various parts of the market.


      If AMD is going to survive in the long-term, it's best American hopes are private equity and/or IBM. Otherwise, it's likely going to land in the hands of one of the large Asian companies. Vertical integration *might* work for a company selling low cost PCs in China or India or possibly Korea. If that company already needed to build lots of fabs, there'd be some useful synergy.

      But simply needing to buy 3% of the CPUs used *only* in the PC market does not provide sufficient synergy or scale to make it worthwhile to spend literally billions on each generation of fab.

      Apple's unit run rate is currently 8 to 10 million units per year. You've got to build a new fab every 2 or 3 years to stay current. Each fab build costs more than the last but realistically you're looking at $3 to $5 billion.

      For convenience, let's look at 2 years at 8 million each and 2 fabs at $4 billion each. We've just spent $500/machine simply on building fabs!


      The last thing AAPL wants to do is get back in the silicon business. Even they admitted that they're primarily a software company when they got with the program and started optimizing Intel reference designs instead of designing from scratch.

      reinharden       Nov 21 12:18 PM
    • Two Key Points On Apple's Stellar Earnings [view article]
      "Deferred Revenue - Current" is generally short for "Deferred Revenue - Current Year" or revenue that is not yet recognized that is due to be recognized in the current year. Depending upon who you ask, there's some room for interpretation as to whether that's the current calendar year, the current fiscal year, "within the next year", or "within the next 12 months". Fortunately I'm not an accountant so I don't have to worry about it too much...

      reinharden       Oct 23 05:04 PM
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