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I analyze my performance every quarter to see if there is any pattern of error in my analysis. I devised a scoring method analogous to the grade point average system used in most US schools. You can read about the fourth quarter here.
This quarter I made one public release of data here and a semi-public update on the iPhone shipments here.
The resulting scores for both early and late estimates are shown in the table below:
This is a transcript of a voice interview conducted April 19th 2012.
The interview is available as an audio file here.
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Jim Zellmer: I thought we’d start by describing your education from the beginning, Horace.
Horace Dediu: OK, that’s good, yeah. I like to say I’m the product of the public school systems. I went to public schools in three different countries, and probably maybe a dozen different schools altogether because we moved a lot, moved over 30 times.
My family emigrated, and we were what you might call political refugees for a while. We were stateless. We didn’t have passports. We were officially not citizens of any country. So, for a period of about four or five years, that was the case. I started having regular schooling in Romania, and then moved to Italy and was enrolled in a school, actually, in the city of Verona, which is where “Romeo and Juliet” was originally set.
I was saying…my background. I spent a year in school in Italy, and I went to school in the north of Italy, in Torino. The thing was that I didn’t know Italian, so I actually had to learn. But that’s a lot easier for children. I was about nine, I think. And so, I learned Italian, was able to have a good school year. But then we moved.
In the summer, we moved again, and we emigrated to the United States. It took about a year to get the paperwork for that–because that was our ultimate goal was to be in the US. I was enrolled in the public schools. First, in Cleveland, where we found someone to help us. I actually went to, I guess, elementary school in the city of Cleveland, where we lived.
And then, later on, for middle school… What happened in Cleveland around that time was that busing started, desegregation. It would have meant, for me, more than one-hour journey across the whole city, from the west end to the east end of Cleveland, and my parents would have none of that. So, we moved to a suburb, immediately adjacent, which is called Lakewood. I went to middle school and high school in Lakewood, Ohio, for three years in high school.
And then, we actually moved yet again, to Boston. My father got a job in the booming tech sector at the time, which was in the early ’80s. I ended up in a suburb of Boston called Medford. We didn’t know much. Again, we were flying pretty blind here. We weren’t familiar with neighborhoods or what were good schools or anything like that–”good schools.” Mostly it was a question of, “Can we find affordable housing?”
Medford turned out to be a pretty lucky choice. In one hand, at the time, it was a blue-collar town. It was one of the near suburbs. So the closer to the city, it tends to be the older the immigrant generations are. It was settled mostly by Italian Americans. And so, a lot of the children I met in school were of some ethnic background.
Again, in the Midwest, that was a bit more rare. So East Coast, for me, was a little bit more vibrant in the sense that there were more interesting ethnic backgrounds and people from different histories and so on.
I enjoyed it, but I only had one year at Medford High School. It was actually more enjoyable, that year, I would say, than my years in Ohio. I have friends that I retained from that one year, and I don’t have friends I stay in touch with from Ohio.
But it has changed. The city since has become much more, I would say, a lot of those families moved yet again, probably to a further suburb, and has changed character. I think it’s more Hispanic now, the city overall. Nothing wrong with that, it just probably would feel different to anyone there now.
I was, again, in Medford. My choice, my next question, was where to go to college. I had been doing OK in school. And that was an interesting puzzle to solve as a kid, because you don’t quite know how to fit in, the usual problems. Fortunately, having moved around so much, I had a pretty thick skin, and having had an accent or a strange background just made you a little bit tougher. And so, I was pretty immune to some of the high-school politics.
I focused on studies, and my parents are both educators. My father has a PhD in mathematics, and my mother had a Master’s in mathematics and she taught. Actually, her job was as a teacher. They both got certified as teachers in the United States. My father had taught, also, university in Romania, but he ended up teaching high school and other two-year colleges in the US. It’s very hard to go into academia from another country.
In any case, the fact that I had such devoted, academically inclined parents helped in focusing me on academics. That also, I think, was my nature. As far as college, my concern, we always had financial concerns, right?
Jim Zellmer: Right.
Horace: So, for me, I wasn’t interested in the social aspect of college. For us, really, the decision was, “Can we keep expenses down?” I was accepted at Tufts University and also at Brandeis, which were local. That was important to me, that it would be near to my home and I could actually commute to these places.
Braizen, an Atlanta design firm, uses Minigroup to manage projects, collaborate and communicate with their clients. This keeps clients happy and helps Brazien work smarter.
A minigroup is a private, secure online space where members communicate with posts and comments, share large files, and manage projects.
Braizen uses one minigroup like an intranet, to discuss business and assign tasks. They also create separate a minigroup for each client, where employees working on various accounts present comp designs and drafts.
“Telling potential clients that we use this tool, where we’ll keep in constant contact with them, definitely helps seal the deal,” says Tyrie, the copywriter at Braizen.
Watch the full interview with Braizen.
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The Earth’s axis is tilted relative to the orbital plane it follows around the Sun. The angle is about 23.44 degrees. Because of this axial tilt, the intensity of sunlight incident on the northern and southern hemispheres varies alternatively throughout the orbit, which, by its duration, is called a “year”. This change in sunlight intensity causes weather changes. Colder when there is less light, warmer when there is more light. Life on Earth became used to this cycle and humans came to call these changes in weather “seasons”.
The warm seasons became the easier seasons for people, especially when agriculture was introduced, since that was when food grew. Because of the geography of landmasses on Earth, humans became more concentrated in the northern hemisphere. As the northern hemisphere turned away from the Sun darkness and cold returned every year. When that darkness was at its worst people decided it was time to celebrate the return of warmth and sunshine, and thus plentiful food.
So it became very common in northern lands to celebrate the winter solstice or the darkest and coldest time of the year. The amazing thing was that all peoples did this regardless of culture or geographic location. In fact, it became common to mark the end of year at around the same time as the solstice. A new year was said to begin when the Sun began to move higher in the sky every day. The Europeans celebrated the solstice with a festival which eventually came to be called Christmas and the Chinese celebrated it as a Winter Festival which came to be called Chinese New Year.
As part of these celebrations, gift giving also became the default practice. And so, around what came to be called “December” and “January” most of the people in the Northern Hemisphere gave gifts to each other. Interestingly, as people migrated to the southern hemisphere they kept the same festival schedule so that gifting was done in what was the height of summer!
What Wall Street seems to have missed is that the gifting season is a global event spanning into January. In other words, buyers of iPhones aren’t concentrated in one part of the planet and they don’t all celebrate one single gifting festival.
The reason lies in the way the Earth is tilted and the way the continents are arranged upon it. So perhaps a better understanding of astronomy and geography would have helped investors make decisions during the past few weeks. I suggest remedial lessons for those who missed this.
A review of Apple’s performance in the first calendar quarter. Covering the iPhone’s predictability, greater China and international opportunity swamping the US opportunity, the iPad surprise and what mobile means to Apple. Dan and Horace ponder what it means for the largest company in the world to also be the fastest growing company in the world. We discuss whether there is a mobile bubble and, as a bonus, Horace predicts the launch timing of the next iPhone.
via 5by5 | The Critical Path #35: Joys and Sorrows.
Covered a lot of ground. Be sure to rate the show on iTunes.
