Part 2 in the Apple Series

This is not about CRM.  It is the last in a series on globalization and labor arbitrage. There’s been a predictable response to the revelations about Apple’s labor relations in China.  Pundits have trotted out that old chestnut that it’s not Apple’s fault but the free market—you and me—who crave cheap and insanely great products [...]

Gates, Jobs and Tinkering

Malcolm Gladwell published an illuminating article on the late Steve Jobs in this week’s New Yorker and I recommend it highly.  If you are looking for something that delves into the dirty laundry of Job’s tempestuous personality there’s some of that but it’s hardly the focus of the piece.  Nevertheless, Gladwell, with a knack for [...]

I want an iPad (almost)

I am an Apple enthusiast but once in a while I need to hit them about the head and shoulders with an old tire tool.  You know? I was in the Apple Store last weekend paying the Apple tax, buying my wife an iPhone.  It was time.  The phone she was using had a battery [...]

Demand Side Economics

Recently I wrote a couple of posts about Apple’s plan to charge vendors 30% of the transaction price for anything sold through the Apple Store (aka App Store).  For many things like software and songs I think this makes a lot of sense.  If you consider that the SG&A line of a company’s balance sheet [...]

Re-intermediation — Same as the Old Boss?

I am watching a trend emerge.  I don’t know if it has a name yet so I will offer this — re-intermediation.  Most of us have been around the technology world in general and the Internet specifically to understand and remember its opposite, disintermediation.  Re-intermediation is a reversal of disintermediation — in many cases formulated [...]

Is the App Store Hamstrung by Its Billing System?

A subscription service provider’s offering has three parts — the actual service-product, an infrastructure for delivering it and, for lack of a better word, value-add.  A provider may deliver all three as a single service but that’s not necessary. A common form of subscription is a car lease in which a customer buys the use [...]

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree

In this case it was the Apple IPad 2. Yesterday’s refresh of the iconic, category making iPad looked more like a bug fix release than a new iteration.  Sure it’s lighter, supports two cellular networks and WiFi and it has the AppStore behind it but it only leaves me saying, “So?” Here’s a news flash [...]

Tablets, CRM and more

Tablet vendors at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas had a coming out party.  Driven by the wild success of the iPad, they introduced something like eighty — that’s 8-0h my goodness — tablet PCs to the world.  Now, by itself that’s significant, especially for CRM, and something hard to miss [...]

The CEO is the Decider

“… organizations are becoming more social but perhaps the right application hasn’t come along yet to enable a CEO to be more social in a professional setting.”

Apple and Microsoft

Yesterday’s news that Apple’s market value slightly eclipsed Microsoft’s was significant and in my haste to get out a post on it, I may not have been able to apply all of my analytical effort so I want to try again. First, to cover basics, the market value of a company is simply the value [...]