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In 1984, Apple pioneered the Graphical User Interface (GUI)’s usage on computers and began the killing of the mainframes along with IBM. They were the first, real PC company although they didn’t really benefit from the PC boom over the next decades. Thankfully, Steve Jobs retained his visionary instincts to launch the iPod at a time when Apple was a lackluster competitor in the ever-increasing competition of the PC industry. Its integrated software-hardware approach to making computers was not going to hold against Dell and Microsoft in their respective strongholds.

Faced with increasing ecosystem pressures, the business organism we know of as Apple, simply evolved. From Apple Computer Inc to Apple Inc, the Apple of 2007 made more than a cursory semantic change in its name, but a paradigm-shifting strategy that had taken shape over the past 5 years. Apple and Steve Jobs (to be used interchangeably here) realized they were no longer in the business of digital education, as was the 19080s vision of Bill Gates who wanted to “put a computer in every family”. No, Steve Jobs just hated being beaten to that goal by Gates. So what did he do when he lost at that game?

He changed the rules and created a new game. Read the rest of this entry »

For those who watched the iPhone keynote address at Macworld 2007, and even for those who didn’t, Steve Jobs had 3 different executives come up on stage to talk about their partnerships with Apple - Eric Schmidt (Google), Jerry Yang (Yahoo) and Stan Sigman (Cingular).

While Jobs was at the top of his game, and Schmidt and Yang weren’t too boring either, Stan Sigman stood out like the sore thumb he was, dressed in a suit and speaking from cue cards. Here’s what Presentation Zen thought of him (entire article here) :

I am tempted to call this the difference between “old school” business presentations (stiff, dull, cue-cards, etc.) and “new school” business presentations (passionate, interesting, conversational, etc.). But that would be a mistake because what seems like a “new school” approach is really not new at all. And what appears to be merely a conservative “old school” approach has never been recommended.

While the comment appears to be an affront to business school graduates like myself, I must sadly agree. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Jobs predicted that the iPhone will ensnare about 1% of the global phone market, which was about 1 billion last year. So he expects to sell about 10M phones, probably in 2008 when the iPhone is available worldwide.

I have been wondering about how to value the stock since I watched the iPhone keynote address (Sidenote: which might turn out to be as revolutionary as the first imac or iPod keynote). I found this nice comparison chart from Seekingalpha:

Some key observations, based on the criteria of comparison in this chart:

1. Expect Cingular to announce a $100-$200 price subsidy. The iPhone is way overpriced now compared to the rest in terms of retail price and we have yet to know how Cingular intends to package this product to the market.

2. Enterprise email services is a glaring weak point of the iPhone. All the other smart phones are compatible with services such as Intellisync, Visio, Blackberry, Visto, MS Exchange. This chart lists iPhone as having none. We shall await for more confirmation of this from Apple as the launch date nears. This point is crucial for the enterprise market to consider the iPhone as a replacement product since the price point may be too high for consumers and college students.

There is also more on the smartphone market from this BusinessWeek report on the Future of Apple.

Market research firm M:Metrics estimates that fewer than 6.2 million smartphones were in use in the U.S. as of the end of November. Of those, 2 million were based on Microsoft (MSFT) software, 1.76 million were BlackBerries, 1.72 million were Palm devices, and some 669,000 ran the Symbian operating system from London-based Symbian Limited, which is jointly owned by several companies, including Nokia, Ericsson (ERIC), Siemens (SI), and Panasonic (MC).

More analysis on the iPhone launch and the AAPL stock can be found here.