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“This is my site. It’s an evolving experiment in collaborative and peer reviewed analysis.”

via MacDirectory: Exclusive | Horace Dediu: Apple expert.

The Post PC era just turned more so.

Coincidence?

You can still get the t-shirt.

The 200 most popular words used to describe the Asymco audience. The data is obtained from 4.3k twitter bios (approximately 55k total words). Generated using Wordle and a bit of Automator, grep, and BBEdit. Click/tap on image for more resolution.

A summary of the attributes of the best audience on the web.

Any student of organizational theory must struggle with the question of how to assign weight to the influence of the leadership of a company. In the case of Apple, the question is:

Is Jobs is the embodiment of Apple or is Apple already Jobsian, imbued with his ethos?

John Gruber summed up (start at 8:00 min) the “Apple is Jobsian” argument by saying that Apple is Steve Jobs’ greatest creation and that he has been working on crafting the company as much as he has been crafting products. The result being that it’s well designed for sustainable longevity.

The arguments for “Jobs is Apple” are mostly rooted in anecdotes of a supreme leader that is indispensable to every decision and detail. There are also ample examples from history of companies who foundered after the departure of founders (Apple itself is notably cited.)

But beside armchair quarterbacking, what evidence is there that Apple is being engineered to operate independent of its founder? Continue reading “Codifying asymmetry: How Apple became Jobsian”

My thanks to Dan Benjamin for taking the time to chat and for preparing this program:

The Pipeline #52: Horace Dediu – 5by5.

Apple’s cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter. Cash increased by $6.1 billion.

The increase in cash is net of approximately $900 million for prepayments and capital expenditures related to the strategic supply agreements that Apple announced last quarter.

The following chart shows the historic cash, short-term and long-term liquid assets Apple holds.

As in previous quarters, the securities Apple holds are: Continue reading “If Cash is King, Apple's is an Emperor [Updated]”

We removed the malicious applications from Android Market, suspended the associated developer accounts, and contacted law enforcement about the attack.

via An Update on Android Market Security – Official Google Mobile Blog.

It’s great to see that Google is quick to call law enforcement to prosecute those who took advantage of its open(!) market. Now I wonder what Google will do about policing copyright infringement on the same market .

In September I wrote a note about how some of the top applications in the Market seemed to be infringing on copyrights (and attempting to hide the fact). Today I went back and searched for “Disney”. I was offered about 350 apps and I am pretty sure that none one of them is endorsed by Disney.[1]

Continue reading “Disney (still) loves Android”

Ever since I started publishing this blog there have been requests for access to the underlying data sets. That’s not an easy thing to do. Spreadsheets are not “productized”. It’s very hard to explain how to use one and even harder for charts. Having been an user of commercial spreadsheet models, I know that it’s a massive undertaking to produce and support them. Many large companies can afford this but few individuals would be willing to pay $15,000 for an analyst’s data.

In many cases even at large companies professional information services staff are employed to master the data sets and answer questions for the general user. The complexity and cost of comprehensive market research is a huge burden for innovation in analysis.

As an independent analyst, I’ve struggled with the question of how to provide this access to a large audience on any device.

Fortunately, modern browsers have the capability to allow interaction with rich charts. Inspired companies are taking advantage of this and implementing data viewers which extend the way users can visualize complex data. Timetric is one such company.

Over the past few months we’ve worked together to find a way to deliver Asymco charts and data as an interactive and downloadable product.

Our first result is this report: Mobile Phone Market Overview: Q4 2010

The video below highlights the main features of the Asymco Interactive report:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maNxiXmKVTA

While a low-end 3G Android smartphone could be sold currently at U$80 (wholesale price) and the adoption of ARM’s Cortex A5 should allow smartphone costs to fall to around US$50, they’ll still have some way to fall to catch up with the cost of 3G feature phones that are already reaching price points of below $30.

via » #MWC11 Day 3 – Same old song. (Informa)

The ubiquity of smartphones is inevitable.

Here’s what a platform jump looks like:

The devil is in the details. Although there was great excitement among investors at the prospect of platform agnosticism, the reality of the press releases shows that Nokia may have some significant short term pain.

Continue reading “Visualizing jumping off a burning platform”