The Critical Path has been an exceptionally well received podcast. It has an audience of hundreds of thousands of thoughtful listeners. Many of the concepts covered can and should be reviewed in a medium that can be referenced and annotated and shared. For this reason I would like to publish edited transcripts of the podcasts as an eBook. This will be an edited and tagged transcript of the first year of The Critical Path.
via The Critical Path: The First Year by Horace Dediu — Kickstarter.
My talk from the 2012 Apple Investor Summit is available on Vimeo. The password is h42Rtz8HJ.
Check out the cool iPad app used for presenting interactively and wirelessly–a foreshadowing of Asymconf.
Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley writes in a note to clients today. “In fact, we believe iPhones are outselling all other smartphones combined at Sprint and AT&T and selling at roughly equal volume to all Android smartphones at Verizon.”
via iPhone Tops Sales Charts at Each of Its U.S. Carriers – John Paczkowski – Mobile – AllThingsD.
That’s useful data. Mainly because we can use it in combination with comScore data that tracks a different market measure. comScore’s MobiLens service tracks US mobile installed base. By measuring the difference between their stats one month to the next, one can measure the gain in a particular platform.
Comparing that gain with the sell-through rate in the same period can yield a figure for the number of units sold as upgrades vs. those sold to new users. Continue reading “Half of US iPhones are repeat purchases”
Regarding the recently proposed Reception and workshop at the Apple Investor Summit, registration is now open.
You can purchase tickets here: asymco-workshop
Details and venue:
Time: 6:30 PM Thursday, March 15th
Location: Room 511, Los Angeles Convention Center, West Hall (across from the Ballroom).
This is a reminder that I will be speaking at the Apple Investor Summit on March 15th at the Los Angeles Convention Center. My topic will be Apple’s capital expenditure structure and how that foretells strategy. I will present previously unpublished data and review the likely scenarios for 2012 iOS device production. As I prepared it I realized that with only 45 minutes there is a limited amount of detail I can provide.
To remedy that and to offer an opportunity to have a detailed question and answer session on related topics, I decided to offer a workshop-like reception at the end of the day. The time would be around 6:30 PM on the 15th and last at most two hours. The location will be in the vicinity of the LA Convention Center.
If you are interested in participating, please let me know so I can decide the type of venue to rent. Please also note that there will be a cost involved and pricing will depend on the number of participants. My current estimate is that the price will be $150 per person.
Occasionally I write articles titled “Why CEO X was fired.” You can read one here, and here and here.
These are allegorical stories. I don’t base the opinion on evidence but on perception of what’s wrong with a particular company’s strategy and then try to trace the point of strategic failure which should have triggered management change. Of course, the reasons are often something else, probably mundane or “political” in nature.
The objective therefore is to analyze strategy and more precisely strategy failure.
So, Yahoo! What went wrong?
Before we answer that, we should know what went right. Yahoo, like Google, depends on advertiser revenues. For that, it sells the behavior of its users. It processes over 25 billion events every day and builds a database (estimated to be in 10s of petabytes) to mine for information that is, hopefully, worth something to advertisers.
But in order to get user behavior it needs to provide compelling reasons for user participation. For that, Yahoo licenses content and offers communication services (among other things.)
This sounds like a reasonable business model. So what could go wrong? Continue reading “Why Carol Bartz was fired”
Every few months rumors emerge of another technology company attempting to create a new product centered around the TV. Apple’s name comes up, of course, but so does Google. And Microsoft has been experimenting with no lesser degrees of vigor than the others. They all seem to be trying to make TV smarter, somehow.
But I would argue that these efforts are misguided. Television is more than the TV set or a set-top box, or any box. It’s more than channels or broadcasters or producers or aggregators or distributors. It’s all of these things; plus more. It’s a value network of great breadth and complexity. It’s a highly modularized industry with well-defined business model boundaries and inter-dependencies. I would argue that its very breadth is what has kept it rigid and immune from disruptive change.
If you look at each technological experiment to move to a new business model, they can all be reduced to the offer of an additional or substitutive module. There is no assumption made that the content being served will change. To put it in the context of mobile computing, it’s like trying to introduce a smartphone in a world without data networks–where the only service to be served is person-to-person calling. Unlike the Smartphone which could only have emerged to leverage the Internet, TV has no “smart content” to leverage. The “smartness” has to be not in the box but in the programming.
Of course, I don’t mean there’s a lack of good programming. What I mean is that there is no innovation in what a program is–the job it’s hired to do. The way it and its distribution fits into a person’s life. TV programs have not changed for half a century. They feature the same genres, the same duration, the same business model, the same series, format and scheduling and the same value chains as when “I Love Lucy” premiered in 1951. They assume people watch TV during the same time each day (while doing nothing else.) They also assume people are equally influenced by brand advertising and that audiences are largely homogeneous.
Contrast that with other media. The song, the book, the game, the newspaper even the movie have gone through consumption changes which have been supported by disruptive innovations. The portable music player, the ebook reader, the console and the mobile phone and the internet in general have all allowed consumption to conform to new usage patterns. The jobs that music is hired to do has changed dramatically. These re-definitions of what media is used for caused dramatic changes in both the production and distribution and hence the way value is captured in media.
TV, it seems, stands alone and immune.
Asymco has reached nearly 19,000 comments from nearly 5,200 contributors. I value every comment and read them all. The process of contribution leads to peer review and encourages differing points of view. It’s essential to finding errors, testing assumptions and, ultimately, learning.
Since starting this blog, I’ve thought about how to increase the participation of the audience and how to offer it as a platform for others. There is a fundamental limit to how much one person can contribute and “move the ball forward.” In that spirit, the method I’m initiating today is to allow comment writers to also write as contributor authors.
Dirk Schmidt is the first such author. Dirk is a resident of Finland but is a native of Germany. He worked in corporate finance for six years. Prior to that, Dirk was an intern at Nokia and practiced management consulting.
Dirk has an MSc from the Leipzig Graduate School of Management. He is on Twitter as @disc1979. Initially Dirk will write on topics related to financial markets and financial analysis.
As Asymco expands, it should be understood as a resource that has many individuals behind it. I look forward to welcoming many more contributors.
This graphic representation of the current and year-ago sources of income and sources of expense for the company shows how the business evolved in the last year.
The colored segments in the first column are Gross Margin contributions per product for Calendar Quarter 2, 2010. The white segments are cost of sales for those products. These costs are combined in the second column and the operating expenses are shown in the third column, taxes in the fourth and Net Income is shown in the fifth.
The same information is shown for Calendar Quarter 2, 2011. Click for larger view (1440 x 873 pixels)
The increase in the first columns is the “top line” growth and the increase in the last (fifth) columns is the “bottom line” growth
Similar charts for the last few quarters are shown here:
Combating superlatives fatigue | asymco
