David Einhorn, the tiny $7Billion Hedge Fund manager, has tweaked the nose of computing’s Goliath, Apple. Since a week Thursday, David has shocked the US business world with his direct, loud, and “uncivil’ attack on Apple’s huge cash hoard of nearly $130Billion. And Apple’s cash hoard islikely getting bigger on a growth rate of 10%per quarter for the …
Samsung leads the Smartphone Market in the US taking over from Apple. But Samsung has leading or near leading positions in the appliances, TV, compact camera, and other electronic device markets. They, not GE nor Phillips nor Sony are currently the first innovators in bring the Moores Law powered electronic chip revolution to consumer products. …
How + Why Samsung Leads Innovation in Electronic Devices Read More »
Is this the best Chart used in US Media for 2012? What is growing in popularity on news sites like cnn.com, The Christian Science Monitor, theDailyBeast, HuffingtonPost, NYTimes, The New Republic, and Time Magazine is the frequent use of charts [or infographics] to clearly describe a situation or better illustrate some analysis. If a picture is worth …
Best Charts of 2012 : The Power of Good Graphics Read More »
The Emergence of Computing’s New Big 3 Apple, Google and Microsoft have become the dominating Big 3 in the Computing Industry “For the past 30 years Computing has been Consumer-driven” – Ben Acelman In case you have not noticed, there is a new Computing Reality – Apple, Google, and Microsoft have become the BIG 3 …
There is a great deal of coverage of the China’s huge telecom manufacturing firm Huawei after it received a bipartisan sanction from the US House Intelligence Committee. But according to diverse sources such as The Economist there is reason for the concern that goes beyond the hidden ownership and connection to the Chinese military including its espionage group. Huawei …
Irans says it is developing nuclear power for peacful purposes. Given the $2B in annual spending on enriched uranium which could be converted to nuclear weapons, Iran could devote those funds to leading the world in developing RE-Renewable Energy for Desalination which looms along with associated grain food shortages as the number one problem facing …
Update 5 Days Later Five days after the iPhone announcement, NYTimes Nick Wingfield helped to confirm our verdict with this story – The iPhone 5 that Apple introduced last week with only incremental changes seemed to signal that the industry has entered an era of technological bunny hops. Faster chips, bigger screens and speedier wireless Internet …
One could look at the financial numbers and quickly proclaim Apple is at the top of Computing Computing’s Big 3 Companies Company Annual Revenues Market Value Quarterly Dividend Apple $109B $622B $2.65 Google $38B $220B $0.00 Microsoft $74B $256B $0.20 IBM $107B $226B $0.85 Oracle $37B $156B $31B Source: Google Finance Apple dominates Microsoft in every …
Windows 8 has received some very bad notices from diverse sources – John Dvorak at Marketwatch and a PC Gamer Tim Edwards among others are some of the salient ones. Despite these nay sayers ye Editor is very optimistic about the success of Windows 8. I think the nay-sayers are protesting too much about the learning curve for …
The London Olympic Games were a broad success and this posting has the links to prove that beyond a doubt. For what was seen live[or time delayed for after supper entertainment in the US] was supplemented with live feeds available from NBCOlympics.com allowing one to watch without commentary just about any Olympic event live [or …
Update: Breaking on July 17. 2012 the NYTimes finally recognizes the profound impact Coursera and other free online university offerings are having on undergraduate education. Read it here or follow Takethe5th.com and get the story 3 months earlier and with live experience nuances. This blog has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Coursera University Courses …
The free online courses available from Coursera [Stanford, Princeton, University of California at Berkley, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvannia] have broken the ice on online college courses. Now MIT has had a program for the past 5 years called OpenCourseWare which made course materials from more than 2,000 classes available free online. Typical MIT …
For the past 2-3 months, this sports fan has been scrambling to find coverage of the many Olympic trials going on throughout the World and North America in particular. The competition is fierce and dramatic for those Tickets to London as old faces triumph or waver [see Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, Phelps and Lochte, …
Google is making its new Nexus Q Media Streamer in the USA. Its a medium sized commitment and it could go wrong because the price is on the high end for media devices despite some of the new features – see a review here. But the significance is not small as noted in the NYTimes and …
The Big 3 in Consumer Computing for the next 3-8 years have declared themselves. With Microsoft and Google now committing to hardware as well as software they have joined Apple as all-in in Consumer Computing. In effect the Apple Model, compete in any and all hardware and software segments while holding the critical OS keys …
The DOJ-Department of Justice when it won its Antitrust case against Microsoft also lost it at that moment because the officials involved had not agreed on a remedy for controling Microsoft. In the end it was $3 billion in fines and kid glove supervision by the Bush DOJ for 5 years. However, one remedy which …
With the announcement of Microsoft’s Surface, now all the major OS vendors have moved all-in in betting to take the Consumer Computing Crown. Microsoft Surface is more than a tablet – Surface Pro is a laptop PC No more side bets through proxy hardware or software vendors, Apple, Google and Microsoft are now building everything required for …
3 OS Vendors Are All-in On Consumer Computing Sweepstakes Read More »
Instead of a growing buildup of excitement for Windows 8 since the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in early March, there has been a growing crescendo of first alarm and then profound disaffection for Windows 8. And this litany is coming from mostly Windows loyalists. This is not good for Redmond. And it …
Update: May16th, 2012 Tom Friedman of the NYTimes is climbing on board and calling it a Revolution. See here. US Universities may have just crossed a tipping point – or should I say 4 tipping points. First David Brooks at NYTimes has written a Martin Luther-like manifesto calling into question the efficacy of college/university teaching …
One can tell the gold rush is on again on the Web to establish the next social media Instagram. What is different from 12 years ago at the apex of the Dot.com bust is the emergence of 3 things: 1)enormous computing IT capacity in 3 areas – chips + memory = cheap but huge computing power, …
Back in 2008 Picnik was cited as one of the best online image editing sites in the business. Two years later in 2010 there was another review no less enthusiastic about Picnik after Google bought the software and added it to Picasa. Other recent reviews put Picnik well above such competition as SplashUp and even …
Free online university courses have really hit their stride this quarter. Courses from Michigan, MIT, Stanford, University of California at Berkley are available now. Free course material has been available from a variety of sources. Near and dear to this blog and web developer are the w3schools set of tutorials on all key coding in web development …
Apple is reserving the right to sue Kodak into oblivion is the headline at AllThings Digital. Once Steve Jobs opened the patent lawsuit “magic box” in Cupertino, Tim Cook seems not able or even remotely inclined to close the lid on the lawyers. This legal maneuvering will have real implications for the rate of innovation at …
The NYTimes story last week on the iEconomy in China has raised again the issue of working conditions and notably practices in China. By Apple executives own admission this is a sensitive issue which could spoil the Apple Brand. Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. …
Vendor Operating System Rate Microsoft Windows XP 86.38% Windows 7 10.78% Windows Vista 1.62% Windows 2003 0.43% Windows 2000 0.09% Other 0.01% Apple Mac OS 0.52% Linux Linux 0.17% Source: Baidu.com With the upcoming Windows 8, Microsoft should see a huge increase in revenues from China. Consider that aging and no longer supported Windows XP …
Update:Penn-Olsen, a Chinese Tech watching website is reporting that Chinese Hackers say release of massive amounts of data was just a joke. The data released on the internet last week was already widely available in hacking circles, according to Wan Tao, the founder of a popular hacking online community. Wan told the Dongfang Daily that …
China’s Massive Internet Security Turmoil:Updated Read More »
A computer operating system is very close to a natural monopoly. Controlling the dysfunctional effects of such monpolies has proven very difficult. A simple monopoly occurs when one supplier provides 60% or more of the product in a marketplace. Monopolies do not have to be dysfunctional. However, in profit maximizing markets there is a strong …
Operating Systems as Natural Monopolies: Think Apple iOS Read More »
Adobe management has a major problem – the operating platform where 50% of its sales come from, Apple, has had top executives sabotaging Adobe’s products and market position. Worse, this abusive behavior has been going on for decades. True, the idea of development neutrality of Operating System vendors is at best only ethically binding [which …
Henry McCracken at Time magazine has shown how to do computer technology predictions – although McCracken adamantly denies they are predictions. But actually they are deliciously witty, cleverly written yet clasically correct statistical forecasts. For under the guise of writing a)what we can assume will happen – the median value, b)what I hope will happen …
My brother Mark has done very well by his investment in Apple stock over the past decade. Given the recent, relatively substantial downturn in Apple stock PE ratio he received an investment advisory from ye Editor. Here is the jist of those remarks. I think Apple is at a crossroads– they could have become the major desktop PC …
Apple at the Crossroads: Leadership in Client Computing at Stake Read More »
PCWorld has a very revealing table on the top smartphones for this Christmas: Color coding of the best versus the lowest ratings is more revealing as Motorola’ s RAZR unexpectedly stands out with better weight and size dimensions and a key feature, MicroSD card which already allows adding of 64GB of storage for all those full …
This is the second part of the Taketh5th review of NYTimes Roger Cohen’s assessment US Interventionism. Our first take was that despite over 100 years of increasing US Intervention in foreign affairs and despite not just the UN but a whole phalanx international agencies such as Atomic Energy Commission, WHO, IMF, World Bank, and others …
