If Gruber touted Zaky, should he share some of the blame for the losses when Zaky led investors astray? That’s hard to say. But it seems that Gruber’s knowledge of Apple products didn’t give him special insight into Apple’s stock price.
The real lesson? Be careful where you get your advice.
Saying Gruber is to “blame” is unfair. ‘Blaming’ Zaky for making others lose money is also wrong. At the end of the day, everybody is just offering advice. In the last week, everyone has put the heat on Zaky’s recent blunders, but you could make similar articles about any ‘analyst’. Bear or bull, it is two sides of the same coin.
Go back in time to 2009 and you can criticise anyone who was bearish on Apple; they lost their consultee’s money by telling them not to invest in $AAPL at that time.
Apple, can play that game too, and possibly better than Samsung in terms of user interface and user experience—but it’s not exactly the game Apple thought it was playing. And in the world of advertising, Google has a clear advantage. It is possible that an alliance between Google and Samsung on TV could limit Apple‘s maneuvering room in the connected TV market.
Samsung effectively stole Android with its lineup of Galaxy-branded devices. I think Google will avoid another intimate partnership with Samsung as much as possible.
I also doubt that an advantage in targeted advertising will be the deciding factor in the ‘living room wars’.
Regardless, I now find myself in the ridiculous situation of thinking that, actually, the only way to deal with Windows 8 in the consumer market is to install one of these stupid Start menu replacements.
The same people who Baxter-Reynolds says hate Windows 8 love the iPad. The iPad is an alien UI to those used to Windows 7 or Vista, but it doesn’t need Start menu replacements to be understood.
The issues with Windows 8 are endemic; the way Microsoft designed the platform (with their two UI metaphors and such) have crippled it. However, I strongly feel that it didn’t have to be this way. I disagree with the analysts who say that Microsoft was doomed to fail, because of their legacy.
If Microsoft had presented a new OS that didn’t look or act like Windows 7 at all, I think it would have been much better received. Instead, they produced a half-hearted attempt, making compromises to try to appease both their incumbent customers and new demographics simultaneously. As a result, everyone ended up with a worse final product.
In this regard, Apple is failing in their stewardship of the App Store, and allowing the value of their platform to falter. Not the overall value – they’re still making and passing along more money than ever – but the value to well-intentioned developers and customers. And therein, as I’ve said before, lies the path to Atari-like irrelevance, and ET cartridges being buried in the desert.
Introducing real trial or demo modes, paid upgrades, and/or easy refunds – things that exist on other platforms – could go a long way towards influencing the App Store gaming economy away from the worst elements of free-to-play. Banning “games” with worthless IAPs, “games” akin to casinos if the player could never, ever win, would also help.
Sidestepping the assumption that the freemium model is toxic for the App Store, I want to address the proposed solutions. It isn’t clear-cut as to whether they would be better than the current situation.
Android has been the pioneer of consumer-friendly app refunds Until November 2011, after downloading an app, the Market gave users 24 hours to request a refund. It seemed like a great idea, but the generous policy was abused. In particular, game developers complained that they were losing significant revenue from users who simply completed their games before the refund window was up. Google tried to combat this by reducing the trial period to fifteen minutes. Although it cut down on the ‘piracy’, it still isn’t perfect — the market for 99cent “one time use” utilities remains susceptible to losing out to exploitative free-riders.
Naturally, the reduction also minimised the benefits of the policy in the first place for users. It’s quite reasonable to argue that Fifteen minutes isn’t really enough time for users to test apps properly. In some cases, the refund window will have already expired by the time the app is ready for use. On Android, a lot of apps download additional data, but because the Play Store cannot differentiate this from use, the refund window may elapse before the app is even functional. A few unscrupulous developers have been found to artificially extend first-run startup times, to ensure that the time limit elapses before a user can come to a decision.
Therefore, a relaxed refund policy may encourage more downloads, but it doesn’t ensure more revenue. In fact, the effects could be more damaging, as shown by the problems the Android ecosystem is fraught by.
Another suggestion from Rene is the addition of paid upgrades, but I’m unclear on what he means by this. iOS’ In-App Purchase system already allows this to happen. Paper is a good example, offering additional features (‘brushes’) for additional fees. Looking at the App Store Games category, it is quite common to see In-App Purchase used to add extra levels. And yet, as demonstrated by the top-grossing chart, the highest earning games are not those who offer paid upgrades. Outside of design and technologically-passionate industries, I expect conversions to be quite low.
Finally, the last suggestion — which is bandied about constantly by bloggers — is the addition of trials to iOS. I think a lot of people have the impression that trials are a silver bullet. It is true that trials have existed on the Mac forever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the right decision. iOS is Apple’s OS X done right, and like any change, there are repercussions. For one, trials complicate the App Store model considerably.
For instance, trials require a lot of usability decisions to be made that turn buying an app into a complex decision tree. For instance, does the app just get deleted when the time runs out? If so, what happens to user data? If I’m trialling a word processor, do my documents just disappear if I let the trial elapse? Also, from a buying standpoint how do app sales affect the final purchase price? If I start a trial during a sale and then want to buy at the end of the trial, do I pay the sale price or the current price? If I trial the app for 30 days, but then a big update happens six months down the line, am I allowed to trial that for 30 days too? Etcetera, etcetera.
Personally, I feel like trials would have a net benefit on ecosystem sustainability, but Apple has trained customers for five years on a much simpler model. The App Store is doing incredibly well already without any of these changes. Until the system is shown to have substantial benefits on another platform, I think Apple’s conservatism will stop it from shaking up the boat — the tradeoffs and uncertainty involved just don’t make sense. One wrong move means a lot of unhappy developers, who rely on the platform to live. It’s serious business. There is no room for experimentation.
In late February, Microsoft offered PC makers the deal of Windows 8 plus Office for $30 for touch-screen devices under 10.8 inches, according to one person familiar with the situation. This compares with around $120 previously. Touch-screen devices above 10.8 inches can still get the discounted Windows 8 price, but Office isn’t included, this person said.
When I saw the headline of the Journal’s article, I had presupposed the discounts would be small and inconsequential. I was surprised that it was actually quite a substantial cut.
I think $90 is a large enough reduction to have an impact on OEM manufacturing decisions, but I don’t think it is enough to reverse the diminishing appeal of Windows 8 devices. Sales can’t change the underlying opinions of consumers on products; Microsoft needs to rethink several key deficiencies in Windows 8 to have a chance at changing that.
So why am I asking for money from Facebook and not Google? Although there havebeen hundreds of technology-related I.P.O.’s over the last decade, Facebook is the first real social-media public offering, where the content on the site is entirely created by its users. (The closest, LinkedIn, had additional business models, including premium payment subscriptions.) “The idea that a business benefits from social interaction is not so strange or new. A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”
Incentives don’t have to be monetary. Almost all “free” web services, including Facebook, only exist because they don’t need to charge for access. Users receive the inherent value of social networks (ease of communication and sharing, finding new friends, etcetera), and — in exchange — allow companies to monetise their information. This has been happening on the web for over a decade.
Facebook just needs to keep offering sufficient value, by bettering its products and features. The mere suggestion that Facebook should reward contributions to the site with money is preposterous.
I know that it’s unnecessary to close apps since it doesn’t use any resources aside from memory but when you decided to declutter, it’s too tedious to do it. Also, because the multitasking tray gets cluttered, doesn’t that makes it unappealing to use? doesn’t that makes us rely on homescreen even in switching between apps? especially on the iPad where multitasking is lot easier with the 4 finger gesture.. would’t be better if there’s a faster way to close apps?
I think this is just patchworking over a deeper issue in the iOS multitasking metaphor. The underlying problem is that too many users perceive the multitasking tray as a queue, when it is meant as a history.
Rather than making it easier to declutter all apps at once, Apple needs to stop users from feeling like they have to clean out the tray; in an ideal design for multitasking a compulsion to “declutter” wouldn’t exist.
Of course, WebOS’ cards metaphor relied on constant maintenance by the user to swipe away cards. I would argue there is a distinction though, as it was a gradual process — cards didn’t ‘pile up’ so it didn’t feel like a chore to swipe them away one by one.
The lawsuit also alleges that Apple did not adequately communicate the discontinuation of the third-generation iPad in favor of the new fourth-generation models in the country, with consumers unknowingly buying the “obsolete” third-generation models.
Legally, I think Apple should be able to release products whenever it wants; this lawsuit simply shouldn’t be valid.
In a filing this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission spotted by BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk, Leap said it expects to sell significantly fewer iPhones than the number it’s obligated to move over the first year of its agreement with Apple. “At our current purchase rate, we project that we will purchase approximately one-half of our first-year minimum purchase commitment through June 2013,” the company said.
The Wall Street Journal appropriates this sales gap to weak iPhone demand, citing the iPhone’s premium price as a deterrent for consumers. But, as all other carriers reported strong (in many cases, records) iPhone sales, it makes much more sense for the deficiencies to be inherent to Leap’s offering, not Apple’s.
For example, I can see why Leap’s unsubsidised sales model is unappealing to customers in the current economic climate, due to the higher upfront prices. Network coverage and reliability issues also need to be factored in.
The data matches up with this. Total customer additions in the fourth quarter for Leap were lower than expected; Leap is struggling with selling phones in the aggregate, its not just iPhones. The Journal’s article states this plainly, and yet they still imply the sales slump is due to a deterioration in the iPhone brand. It’s so blatant they are trading on the “impending-doom-of-Apple” bandwagon for linkbait-driven traffic.
Samsung took the wraps off of its new Samsung Wallet app during a developer conference at Mobile World Congress on Wednesday. The Wallet app is designed to let users store things such as event tickets, boarding passes, membership cards, and coupons in one central location, much in the same fashion as Apple’s Passbook app for iOS.
Just before Christmas, the Clear for Mac team gathered around a box that had arrived from San Francisco. Inside, was a rather intriguing piece of hardware. Over the past couple of months, we’ve been stealthily working on adding support for this futuristic piece of hardware to Clear for Mac - and today we’re thrilled to announce that Clear for Mac will soon support the rather incredible Leap Motion controller.
Leap has an insane level of detection fidelity for a relatively-cheap consumer product, which is awesome, but no one is actually going to use hand gestures to manage todos.
WDSU’s LaTonya Norton asked Mo: “Now, haven’t you run before?”
Clearly perplexed, Mo replied: “Sorry?”
LaTonya went on: “Haven’t you run before? This isn’t your first time.”
Mo then replied simply: “No this is not my first time.”
It’s obvious that she is not used to talking without a teleprompter. Farah is so dumbstruck by the question he interprets it as “Haven’t you run a half-marathon before?”, ending the awkward pause in the conversation.
Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, sat down for an interview with Forbes and was asked if Sony’s new fleet of cloud services would be available at launch. “I think it’s aspirational on the device, as opposed to us standing up there, pounding the floor and saying the day this thing ships all this stuff will be there,” Tretton replied. “I think it’ll absolutely be there for the device, but I don’t know whether it will be there for day one on the device.”
In hindsight, it is very clear to me that the event on the 20th wasn’t really about PlayStation — it was about being first.
Sony talked a lot about using Gaikai technology to stream old PS games to the PS4, when it really should have been talking about streaming some to your iPhone or Android tablet. It should have been talking about offering indie game developers access to the PlayStation network and, through that, the PlayStation app in people’s pockets. If you want to fight the subsumption of console gaming into handheld gaming, plant a trojan horse on phones that opens a window into your gaming world with the tap of an icon.
Without question, Sony didn’t push the boat out as far as they could. I saw no change in how Sony views the console market and no change to how Sony manages the console games market — indie developers remain shut out. Their announcements boil down to a more powerful PS3 driven by the same traditional, backward, philosophy.
On that underlying point, Panzarino is spot on, but I disagree that pushing Gakai-powered PS3 games on iOS and Android is the right way forward. If Sony had announced a PlayStation app for iPad that streamed games, it would have been seen, retrospectively, as a big misstep.
Streaming console games relies on a persistent internet connection with low latency and reasonably fast download speeds. This just doesn’t match up well with mobile. On cellular data, 3G is a definitive no and LTE would be shaky — the pings just aren’t fast enough for even casual gaming. Even when at home, most people’s broadband and WiFi infrastructure isn’t fit for purpose or available universally in some rooms of their house.
For certain, Sony needs to adapt their stance towards iOS. I just don’t think streaming is the answer, for the short and medium term, and a much better path would be to redistribute resources to bringing AAA titles to the iPad. I mean, assuming the network issue is overcome, what about the controller problem? You can’t adequately play Call of Duty for consoles using a touch screen. When it comes down to it, streaming console games to mobile is a way to circumvent native application development. Therefore, the concept — at a minimum — faces the same issues as HTML 5 apps do.
Other than touch response, though, this is probably the fastest Chromebook we’ve ever used. That’s thanks to an Intel Core i5 processor, which powers the machine and — unfortunately — also seems to join with the display to keep the battery life to a ho-hum five hours. There’s a paltry 32 GB of storage on board, which should serve as a reminder that Google really, really wants you to keep everything in the cloud. To help, the company is offering 1TB of storage for three years along with every Pixel.
This laptop would have been a lot more desirable before Apple cut the prices on the thirteen-inch Retina MacBook Pro. If Apple hadn’t changed the prices of the thirteen-inch Retina MacBook Pro, there would be a $400 difference between the Pixel and the Pro. That’s quite a significant price gap, which might have allowed the Pixel to carve out some marketshare. $400 is a significant price differential to make consumers skip over the limitations of Chrome OS and seriously consider buying a Pixel.
However, Apple did drop prices. The base thirteen-inch Pro was reduced from $1699 to $1499. As a result, I think the Pixel is a much tougher proposition. The “Mac penalty” is now just $200, and for that you get an actual computer where you can get actual Office, actual Pages, actual games, actual video editor, actual photo browser, etcetera etcetera …
I do want to thank Google for their generosity with bundled storage, though. One terabyte is plenty for anyone who will use this machine, as you will be constrained by network bandwidth caps long before you hit your storage limits. Granted, it only lasts for three year but still — it is a million times better than iCloud’s free tier.
Apple and Samsung accounted for $6.5 billion in increased sales in 2012, while the remainder of the consumer technology industry declined by almost $9.5 billion.
