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Many comments on and off this blog raise the specter of the inevitable decline in Apple’s margins due to two forces: The iPhone begins to reach into more markets or points of distribution without exclusivity. The Android surge will apply competitive pressure forcing Apple’s pricing and hence margins. The first claim can be countered by [...]

The new Apple TV has created a cottage industry of pundits debating the future ownership of your living room. This topic of to whom your living room belongs has been around since the 90′s when Microsoft sought to plant a flag on your TV set and claim it in the name of Gates with a [...]

When I asked members of The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, a group of chief executives who meet each year to deliberate on issues of public interest, to name the most influential business book they had read, many cited Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in [...]

When I wrote about Android’s pursuit of the biggest losers, I made the explicit claim, backed by data, that Android was most attractive to device vendors who were in financial distress. Android is a lifeline to sustain failing business models. But underlying that claim was the more sinister implication that Android is sustaining to the [...]

Gartner explicitly explained so in its press release: “Gartner’s PC group does not track media tablet sales in this PC shipment data, so iPad sales are not included in these results via Is Apple the real U.S. PC market share leader — or soon will be? | Betanews. The reluctance of  industry analysts to measure [...]

Once the pride and joy of the world’s largest computer systems builder, consumer products now make up just 18% of Dell’s total sales. That’s probably a good thing in the long run, because this segment is notoriously margin-poor when compared to the less price-sensitive corporate computing market. I can’t blame IBM for giving up on [...]

I’ve been asked in comments on this blog who will win the “mobile war”. I use two analytical tools to answer this question: (1) history (2) value chain analysis. History shows that operators are very important and hence very powerful in this market. That makes sense on many levels. They control what phones you get [...]

The mobile phone market is intertwined with the telecommunications industry which is vast and there are numerous competitors which are much more dynamic and better capitalized than the moribund PC or music player vendors. It’s also a regulated and fragmented global market with 1.2 billion units and 5 billion consumers—far greater than any of the [...]

Speaking of correlation… General Electric, the largest holding in the S&P 500 Value Index Fund, has a forward price-earnings ratio of fourteen. Apple, the quintessential growth stock and largest member in the S&P 500 Growth Index Fund, sports a P-E based on forward 12-month estimates of just 15.5 right now. via CNBC’s Fast Money : Growth [...]

All phone vendors saw smartphones coming.  They hired all the right market research companies and spent lavishly on analysts to confirm that phones with operating systems were imminent. Nokia was one of the early movers, establishing its own software platforms group as early as 2002 while others like Samsung licensed Windows Mobile or PalmOS as [...]