Apple’s Time-to-Market Advantages with the iPad

February 22, 2011

Today, Kara Swisher with All Things Digital revealed that Apple will announce the iPad 2 next week on March 2nd. To those who care intensely about this kind of stuff – which would be pretty much everyone in the tech ecosystem – Apple will hold its much-anticipated event on March 2, where the tech giant [...]

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The Unbundling of Media

February 21, 2011

Bundling explained Bundling is a strategy that involves combining several products into one product. A classic example of a bundle is the Microsoft Office Suite, which combines several applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, into a single product. The economic rationale for bundling is clear. Imagine a writer willing to pay $100 for Word [...]

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Why Apple’s New Subscription Model is a Strategic Mistake

February 18, 2011

Apple is known for delivering products that integrate software (apps), content (music, videos), and hardware (iPod, iPhone, iPad), with the software and content available through iTunes. While this software and content is integral to Apple’s products, hardware sales drive the lion’s share of the company’s revenues and profits. Consider that in 2010 Apple generated revenues [...]

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Apple and Industry Forces

February 17, 2011

Most people attribute Apple’s stunning financial performance to its differentiated products, which integrate excellent hardware, software, and content. If you dig deeper, however, you realize that other critical factors have played a substantial role in Apple’s financial performance over the last decade. One factor rarely discussed in detail, but that has a significant impact on [...]

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Why the Xoom is Priced in the $600-799 Range

February 16, 2011

Motorola Xoom price official: $799 unsubsidized on Verizon, $600 for WiFi-only There you have it, folks — the exhausting saga of the Xoom’s pricing has finally been laid to rest by Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha. Reuters reports a $799 levy for the 32GB Honeycomb tablet when bought with 3G (which will be upgraded to 4G) [...]

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Will Android Lead to a Race to the Bottom?

February 15, 2011

To assess the implications of Android for smartphone producers, it’s useful to look at the history and evolution of the PC industry. In the early days of the personal computer (PC), IBM gave away the PC standard to Microsoft and Intel, creating “Wintel.” The Wintel standard meant that every PC incorporated the same microprocessor, the [...]

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Nokia Plan B?

February 14, 2011

An open letter to Nokia shareholders and institutional investors We are a group of nine young Nokia shareholders. All of us have worked with Nokia in different capacities in the past. We plan to challenge the company’s strategy and partnership with Microsoft in the next Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011. I think the authors [...]

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A Brief Assessment of the Microsoft-Nokia Alliance

February 14, 2011

Back story There was a flurry of news out of Finland last week. Nokia has finally awaken from its deep slumber to realize just how far behind it has fallen in the smartphone market relative to Apple, Google, Motorola, HTC, and others. On Tuesday, the CEO distributed what’s now being called “the burning platform memo.” [...]

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Yahoo’s Downward Spiral

February 1, 2011

Yahoo has been on the ropes lately. While its profits were up in 2010 due to significant cost cutting efforts, its revenues were down considerably, declining from $7.2b in 2008 to $6.3b in 2010. An important question for Yahoo is, what does this precipitous decline in revenue, coupled with trends in technology and competition, suggest [...]

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Kinect’d TVs

January 28, 2011

Yesterday, in a conference call with analysts, Peter Klein, Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer, said that the Kinect is the “fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history.” The company sold 8 million Kinect sensors in its first 60 days after launch. This is a big win for Microsoft. Not only is the Kinect a commercial success, but [...]

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