14. Like a rodent happily spinning itself into oblivion on its own internally created hamster-wheel, Shantanu Narayen gave us a peek into why the Jobsian Juggernaut has been left virtually unchallenged - and why, remaining unchallenged over time, will eventually parlay itself into a self-fulfilled silicon prophet (spelled p-r-o-f-i-t) who garners honor even in his own country (because Apple will be the first trillion-dollar company).
Expounding on why Adobe profits are down and will continue to "dip" (if not for Apple customers one might make that "plummet"), Mr. Narayen pulled his head out of the sand long enough to tell a sympathizing sychophantic journalist that any crashes of Flash in Mac OS X could not possibly be related to Adobe's software, but instead are the fault of the questionable Mac Operating system.
He also was gracious enough to set the record straight about Job's patently false claims that Flash is in any way responsible for causing excessive drains on battery-powered mobile systems. In fact, Narayen adjusted a carefully placed mirror when dismissing Jobs' stated problems with the technology behind Flash as a "smokescreen."
Citing Job's obsession with control, he blasted the Apple Chief for wanting to control the system to the point that it affected the user experience. "We believe in creating one application that can be used across all platforms. Take a suit of clothes as an analogy. Jobs believes in tailoring the suit to best fit a certain type of wearer - while we believe that it is best to have a "one size fits all. Apple insists that this creates problems for their Mac body-type - which doesn't wear clothes off the rack very well - but we say the fit is good enough for the rest of the world - it's good enough for Apple! In short, Apple is too good - they feel they are too good to look and perform like the rest of us! I control Steve - Steve doesn't control me!
During the live interview, Narayen was hoping not to have to take a call from his former employees Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh (former Adobe mobile engineers) who were working on the development of Flash Lite for emerging mobile platforms because Adobe knew Flash was such a resource hog. The whole Adobe Flash Lite program was cancelled, of course, in 2007 when it became apparent to the Adobe braintrust that the just-released Apple iPhone was going to be a bust and they opted instead to concentrate all of their resources on what they assumed would be the increasing market demand for increasingly powerful feature-rich phones like Japan already had.
Continued Narayen "What the world needs now, besides a 15MP phone camera, is a mobile platform that can handle native Flash in all of its splendiferous glory at the 8MB memory level - as opposed to this Flash-Lite nonsense where we would be expected to produce Flash-like results with just a few KB memory overhead instead! "Ridiculous!" snorted Narayen, saying "I had to fire that group of rebels insisting on Flash Lite! It was like having Steve Jobs at work on the fifth floor below! Thankfully, everyone who had sympathies with that group have finally been purged from the pure essence of Adobe!"
With genuises like Hyderabad wunderkind Narayen driving their entry, there can be little wonder why Adobe remains firmly rooted in the pole position of the "Indian Apple-Less" silicon speedway on the growing list of laughing stocks falling over themselves to see who can outdo one another in the race to be famously and deservedly dissed and dismissed on their own merits by Steve Jobs.
15. Not to be outdone by Narayen, Dan Rayburn as Exec. VP of Streaming Media, brilliantly notes that Apple surely must be feeling the pressure from the large group of consumers who have yet to buy one of the recently purchased million iPads already into user's hands. Surely, as the highly satisfied iPad group swells to 2 million and then on to 3, 4, and 5 million, Dan notes that the pressure to allow Flash to bog down the iPad experience must be near unbearable.
Dan furthers demonstrates his amazing accumen for wrong-way Corriganism when he points out that Jobs takes Adobe to task for being a closed environment, while his own Apple OS X system is closed or proprietary! Leaping on the similarities as to how the adjective C-L-O-S-E-D is spelled with regard to Adobe's environment and Apple's system, Dan shrewdly sidesteps the need to examine the nouns at the right of the identical adjectives, relying instead on traits that must be responsible for the following gems of thought...
Dan takes Jobs to task for trying to fool people into believing the iPad experience is a "full Web" experience. This is an outright lie, Dan explains, because clearly Job's iPad cannot access the 75% of the Web composed of the bloated, bad malware and battery draining delights which clogs and imparts familiarity and a certain value to everyday PC users' experiences. Showing his skills as a word-wizard, Dan nails Jobs on the obvious point that Jobs is lying when he says the iPad gives a full web experience! It can't, Dan gleefully notes, - because a full experience must necessarily embrace all of the bad karma that is out there - which Job's iPad simply doesn't do! Point two for Rayburn!
Rayburn also burns Jobs by pointing out that SproutCore just debuted this week new HTML5 web development tools and MLB and NFL have yet to implement them to make the switch to HTML5. Of course, Rayburn was recently burned himself when his big example, YouTube, opted over to offer HTML5, so he wisely went silent on that one - just as he will when all the other waiting sites will begin to use resources like SproutCore to make the transition. And he was strangely silent on MicroSoft's recent admission that HTML5 was the future for the web, and Flash was a dinosaur memory hog that was a deadman walking.
Relying on the huge installed base of PC dinosaurs to complain when they may have trouble running HTML5 (of course they also have trouble running Flash but have managed a work around for it - (remember, molasses as a lubricant is merely a point of perspective, like the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind!) Dan is quick to point out that this installed base of aging PCs running Windows 98 and XP "IS" the PC era that everyone should be basing their metrics on for future development.
Rayburn takes Jobs to task for this obvious oversight, chiding "Well I hate to tell you this Steve, but it's still the PC era" as he ducks for a Pterodactyl gliding by. Dan continues "For all the growth of the mobile space in the U.S., how much of that content consumed on a mobile device is video? - Very little!" Rayburn, buoyed by the sheer logic thus cast, continues his flawless assault on Jobs' archaic-forward thinking - thus, "No one is getting rid of their PCs because they have a mobile device, the PC is not going anywhere and the volume of content that is delivered to PCs will always surpass what will be delivered to mobile. Apple's iPhone and iPads are not going to replace the PC experience, ever.”
Relying on CompuServe as the lynchpin in his syllogism, Rayburn continues "And I dare say that, like CompuServe, PCs are the reigning Tyrannosaurus Rexes in the world and no mobile computing will ever overtake their current paradigm!"
Wow - that's one wrong-way Corrigan that really knows how to "turn" - er, twist a phrase!! At this rate, he won't be lambasting Jobs, he'll simply be looking for Jobs.
16. Eric E. Schmidt - Chief Executive Officer of Google - displays what has (for him) become a vanguard expression of "wrong-way Corriganism." While most of the wrong-way Corrigans highlighted in this growing list are chronicled for being 180 degrees off the mark, while thinking themselves smugly in the know, Mr. Schmidt represents a special kind of "snake in the grass" Corriganism, wherein he knows the score, but pretends to be a member of the homo booboisee.
For example, he sat quietly on the Apple board, pretending to be an amicable director from a flagship search engine company, but all the while the "silicon leprechaun" was playing a desperate game of corporate espionage where he siphoned off what he could in the way of previews of Apple's technology output and roadmap, while "in typical stealth mode" taking it all back to Google and disseminating it to a waiting band of cutthroat copycats in whom he had cultivated a greedy taste for Apple insider information. Only when it got too obvious for even the leprechaun's hot Apple-lust, did Eric ever recuse himself from certain parts of Apple's Board meetings, and then only for those portions of the meetings where he waited outside in the hallway while the rest of the board continued in closed session.
Unable to change his ways any more than a leopard can its spots, Eric was asked recently what he thought of the iPad, to which he replied "You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet." In typical Eric-Speak (craven-version - which is the only known version to exist), this means that Google has an iPad me-too under wraps and will want to launch it in much the same fashion as they have the iPhone me-too.
Sure enough, the New York Times reports, Eric the Silicon Leprechaun told friends at a recent party in Los Angeles about the new device, which would exclusively run the Android operating system. People with direct knowledge of the project - who did not want to be named because they were unauthorized to speak publicly about the device - said the company had been experimenting in "stealth mode" with a few publishers to explore delivery of books, magazines, and other content on a tablet.
It's not that Eric the Craven is a wrong-way Corrigan who doesn't "get it" - it's that (while he does indeed "get it") - he pretends not to, laying back like a snake in the grass when actually developing his own insider-based competitive products in his trademark "stealth mode."
The problem is Eric is unable to take a page from John Milton's character from "The Devil's Advocate" wherein he tells young Kevin Lomax to never let your enemies see you coming. With Eric, everyone but Eric sees him coming - and all the while Eric continues like the Iago he is, unable to tell that his backside is so exposed.
No wonder Steve Jobs, in effect smarting from Eric's duplicituous stabbing of Apple, may well have opined like did Antony of Brutus's treachery in stabbing Caesar, "...and this, Ericius, was the most unkindest cut of all."
While Steve may well deign to have coffee in public with Ericius when it suits his purpose, he will hardly allow Ericius the scorpion the opportunity to sting Apple again, saving Ericius the need to explain why he would sting anything ferrying him across a pond he would otherwise be unable to navigate on his own. As Jobs famously summarized, "We did not enter the search business, they entered the phone business."
When the scorpion explains why he treacherously stings an ally, he must be unaware of his own evil, merely excusing the act to be the natural result of some unintentional innate urge (re: the scorpion's reply to the toad as they both sank, "It's in my nature!").
Naturally, it is only fitting that Google would have a mantra like "Don't be evil," while all the while being only that at its highest echelons (and no doubt being quite unaware of it themselves - even though it is obvious to any reasonable observer).
Again, as Jobs has famously uttered, "...one more thing. This [Google] don't be evil mantra: It's bullsh*t!"
I don't know why I find it intriguing that certain personalities, who are responsible for running incredibly large and powerful multinational corporations, should have such a different take on Apple than I do. It sometimes makes me wonder if my little grip on reality is all that secure. Their actions continually remind me of a famous American football personality I heard of named "Wrong Way Corrigan." When given the ball in a crucial game, he made a heroic run for the goal, going past every defender who tried to stop him, and did not stop until he passed the goal line. The only trouble is that he went the wrong way, crossing the other team's goal line - and winning the game for them. Supposedly along the way, he was being shouted at by everyone to stop - turn around - go the other direction - but Wrong-Way ignored them all, kept his head down, and famously performed on a public stage one of the most famous epic failures of all time.
But now I think these examples may be more like watching Charley Sheen (as some may have had the recent opportunity to see him self-destruct). You wanted to look away but somehow it was remarkable to see someone say the things he did (some remarks seemed quite considered) and go down that road of self-destruction in the manner he did. Somewhat similar - I suppose - to being a "rubbernecker" over here on the California highways when passing the unfortunate circumstances of another human being. You know you shouldn't look but are tempted to take a peek if you can do so without slowing traffic or creating a danger yourself (something that perhaps can't be done in the long run anyway).
At any rate, two new Sheens have popped up on the Wrong-Way Radar screen and I am cretin enough to document them here below for posterity.
17. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer [you know - that Redmond, WA. company responsible for such enduring and rock-solid performers as Windows NT and Windows Me and Windows Vista (ad nauseum)], said today that he's not sure whether Apple's iPad will "remain with us or not" because Mundie sees it as just a passing fad.
Echoing his boss's (Steve Ballmer - see above) earlier dismissive take on Apple's success as nothing more than a "rounding error," the erstwhile Mundie quashed the debate once and for all - to any who might have previously questioned his credentials to be the leader responsible for research and strategy for Microsoft - by being equally dismissive of Apple's petty little feat of selling (to actual end-users) 15 million first generation iPads and being on track to far surpass this with the iPad2.
In what can only be described as "pure genius" [as it is defined in Redmond], Mundie summed it all up for posterity when he stated "Today you can see tablets and pads and other things that are starting to live in the space between (a PC and a smartphone). Personally, I don't know whether that space will be a persistent one or not." This is because Mundie believes the successor will not be a smartphone or an iPad, but a "room" (didn't I see this concept already lampooned in the film "Back to the Future" - ahem!)?
18. Andy Lark - Dell's global head of marketing, predicted that Apple's iPad will eventuallly succumb to Dell's Android & Windows-based tablets because of pressure from an open enterprise market. While congratulating Apple for igniting the tablet opportunity with the iPad, Lark predicted the device will ultimately fall to more "open competitors." Citing the creed of Adobe, Lark continued the mantra by stating that he is actually happy that Apple created the market (so he can profit by it no doubt) - "but longer term, open, capable and affordable will win, not closed, high priced and proprietary."
Showing why Dell is at the point they're at today (due no doubt in part to the fact that they only recruit and hire the best), Lark trained his deeply analytic powers on the situation at Cupertino and delivered the following divination "The challenge they've got is that already Android is outpacing them. Apple is great if you've got a lot of money and live on an island. It's not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things can become quite complex." Lark explained.
When asked to expound on so deep a thought, the great man stopped briefly on his triumphant stride from the speaker's podium and fixed the obviously ignorant interviewer with a sad stare. Explaining in the simplest terms that even an Apple fanboy could understand, Lark thundered the following inescapable logic: "It's the high cost of additional accessories for the iPad that makes the tablet inaccessible. An iPad with a keyboard, a mouse and a case [ed. note - overlook the fact that no PCs come with a cover either while ignoring the fact that the iPad doesn't need or want (in most cases) a keyboard or a mouse] and you'll be at $1500 or $1600; that's double of what you're paying," he patiently explained to the half-wit reporter. "That's not feasible" he stated, mercifully ending the explanation there, not wishing to embarrass Apple enthusiasts any further by continuing to dash their hopes that the iPad might one day be a success of which they could be proud.
It's nice to see Apple's competition take the initiative and show mercy when dealing with the crazed Apple RDF adherents that one sometimes comes across when dealing with technology people can't live without. In all fairness, he could have - AND DIDN'T - point out the obvious - that besides the mouse and keyboard and covers, Lark graciously did not point out that by adding the equally obvious add-on of a Mercedes CL-Class automobile, it would have really put it over the top and unquestionably into a category that ordinary people just couldn't afford.
Oh, to be Richard Cory (er - I mean Andy Lark!) ...
Oooops - forgot one that popped up today on the radar screen.
19. Last fall, Acer's chairman JT Wang predicted that Apple's share of the tablet market would plunge from near 100 percent to just 20 to 30 percent because of the "closed platform" of Apple's iPad iOS, noting confidence in Android in saying that it "simply need a little more time before it turns strong."
Now this...
Stan Shih, the founder of Acer, the second largest PC maker globally, has acknowledged that the company must overhaul its operations to focus on profit margins rather than market share in reaction to the success of Apple.
To this...
Acer Corp. Chief Executive Gianfranco Lanci resigned Thursday, as his company looks to reorganize in an effort to take on the iPad and other tablets like it. The company hopes to find a permanent successor by the end of April.
Lanci's exist was put in context on Friday by DigiTimes, which noted that the impact from Apple products was a "key reason" for his departure. Could JT Wang be in the wings?
20. Cliff Edwards of the Wall Street Journal ran this advice for Steve Jobs back in May, 2001 when he wrote an article titled: "SORRY, STEVE: HERE'S WHY APPLE STORES WON'T WORK."
In it this wrong way Corrigan actually quotes other luminary Wrong-Ways, pontificating on why the Apple stores are such a bad idea. I think that their comments are most illuminating about the attitudes that still reside today in many of these technology companies. To wit:
"Apple's problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers," gripes former Chief Financial Officer Joseph Graziano. Note that this is a FORMER Chief Financial Officer. No wonder!
"I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," says David A. Goldstein, president of researcher Channel Marketing Corp.
"When you choose to compete with your retailers, clearly that's not a comfortable situation," says CompUSA Chief Operating Officer Lawrence N. Mondry. Note - has anybody seen a Comp USA lately? I didn't think so!
"They are the most secretive company I've ever done business with," says one top retailer. "They should let the news leak out, to convince the world how exciting their stuff is. That's how everyone else does it. Maybe it's time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently." Our friend - that savvy analyst Cliff Edwards again, summing it all up with the wisdom of the day.
Comments
Expounding on why Adobe profits are down and will continue to "dip" (if not for Apple customers one might make that "plummet"), Mr. Narayen pulled his head out of the sand long enough to tell a sympathizing sychophantic journalist that any crashes of Flash in Mac OS X could not possibly be related to Adobe's software, but instead are the fault of the questionable Mac Operating system.
He also was gracious enough to set the record straight about Job's patently false claims that Flash is in any way responsible for causing excessive drains on battery-powered mobile systems. In fact, Narayen adjusted a carefully placed mirror when dismissing Jobs' stated problems with the technology behind Flash as a "smokescreen."
Citing Job's obsession with control, he blasted the Apple Chief for wanting to control the system to the point that it affected the user experience. "We believe in creating one application that can be used across all platforms. Take a suit of clothes as an analogy. Jobs believes in tailoring the suit to best fit a certain type of wearer - while we believe that it is best to have a "one size fits all. Apple insists that this creates problems for their Mac body-type - which doesn't wear clothes off the rack very well - but we say the fit is good enough for the rest of the world - it's good enough for Apple! In short, Apple is too good - they feel they are too good to look and perform like the rest of us! I control Steve - Steve doesn't control me!
During the live interview, Narayen was hoping not to have to take a call from his former employees Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh (former Adobe mobile engineers) who were working on the development of Flash Lite for emerging mobile platforms because Adobe knew Flash was such a resource hog. The whole Adobe Flash Lite program was cancelled, of course, in 2007 when it became apparent to the Adobe braintrust that the just-released Apple iPhone was going to be a bust and they opted instead to concentrate all of their resources on what they assumed would be the increasing market demand for increasingly powerful feature-rich phones like Japan already had.
Continued Narayen "What the world needs now, besides a 15MP phone camera, is a mobile platform that can handle native Flash in all of its splendiferous glory at the 8MB memory level - as opposed to this Flash-Lite nonsense where we would be expected to produce Flash-like results with just a few KB memory overhead instead! "Ridiculous!" snorted Narayen, saying "I had to fire that group of rebels insisting on Flash Lite! It was like having Steve Jobs at work on the fifth floor below! Thankfully, everyone who had sympathies with that group have finally been purged from the pure essence of Adobe!"
With genuises like Hyderabad wunderkind Narayen driving their entry, there can be little wonder why Adobe remains firmly rooted in the pole position of the "Indian Apple-Less" silicon speedway on the growing list of laughing stocks falling over themselves to see who can outdo one another in the race to be famously and deservedly dissed and dismissed on their own merits by Steve Jobs.
Dan furthers demonstrates his amazing accumen for wrong-way Corriganism when he points out that Jobs takes Adobe to task for being a closed environment, while his own Apple OS X system is closed or proprietary! Leaping on the similarities as to how the adjective C-L-O-S-E-D is spelled with regard to Adobe's environment and Apple's system, Dan shrewdly sidesteps the need to examine the nouns at the right of the identical adjectives, relying instead on traits that must be responsible for the following gems of thought...
Dan takes Jobs to task for trying to fool people into believing the iPad experience is a "full Web" experience. This is an outright lie, Dan explains, because clearly Job's iPad cannot access the 75% of the Web composed of the bloated, bad malware and battery draining delights which clogs and imparts familiarity and a certain value to everyday PC users' experiences. Showing his skills as a word-wizard, Dan nails Jobs on the obvious point that Jobs is lying when he says the iPad gives a full web experience! It can't, Dan gleefully notes, - because a full experience must necessarily embrace all of the bad karma that is out there - which Job's iPad simply doesn't do! Point two for Rayburn!
Rayburn also burns Jobs by pointing out that SproutCore just debuted this week new HTML5 web development tools and MLB and NFL have yet to implement them to make the switch to HTML5. Of course, Rayburn was recently burned himself when his big example, YouTube, opted over to offer HTML5, so he wisely went silent on that one - just as he will when all the other waiting sites will begin to use resources like SproutCore to make the transition. And he was strangely silent on MicroSoft's recent admission that HTML5 was the future for the web, and Flash was a dinosaur memory hog that was a deadman walking.
Relying on the huge installed base of PC dinosaurs to complain when they may have trouble running HTML5 (of course they also have trouble running Flash but have managed a work around for it - (remember, molasses as a lubricant is merely a point of perspective, like the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind!) Dan is quick to point out that this installed base of aging PCs running Windows 98 and XP "IS" the PC era that everyone should be basing their metrics on for future development.
Rayburn takes Jobs to task for this obvious oversight, chiding "Well I hate to tell you this Steve, but it's still the PC era" as he ducks for a Pterodactyl gliding by. Dan continues "For all the growth of the mobile space in the U.S., how much of that content consumed on a mobile device is video? - Very little!" Rayburn, buoyed by the sheer logic thus cast, continues his flawless assault on Jobs' archaic-forward thinking - thus, "No one is getting rid of their PCs because they have a mobile device, the PC is not going anywhere and the volume of content that is delivered to PCs will always surpass what will be delivered to mobile. Apple's iPhone and iPads are not going to replace the PC experience, ever.”
Relying on CompuServe as the lynchpin in his syllogism, Rayburn continues "And I dare say that, like CompuServe, PCs are the reigning Tyrannosaurus Rexes in the world and no mobile computing will ever overtake their current paradigm!"
Wow - that's one wrong-way Corrigan that really knows how to "turn" - er, twist a phrase!! At this rate, he won't be lambasting Jobs, he'll simply be looking for Jobs.
For example, he sat quietly on the Apple board, pretending to be an amicable director from a flagship search engine company, but all the while the "silicon leprechaun" was playing a desperate game of corporate espionage where he siphoned off what he could in the way of previews of Apple's technology output and roadmap, while "in typical stealth mode" taking it all back to Google and disseminating it to a waiting band of cutthroat copycats in whom he had cultivated a greedy taste for Apple insider information. Only when it got too obvious for even the leprechaun's hot Apple-lust, did Eric ever recuse himself from certain parts of Apple's Board meetings, and then only for those portions of the meetings where he waited outside in the hallway while the rest of the board continued in closed session.
Unable to change his ways any more than a leopard can its spots, Eric was asked recently what he thought of the iPad, to which he replied "You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet." In typical Eric-Speak (craven-version - which is the only known version to exist), this means that Google has an iPad me-too under wraps and will want to launch it in much the same fashion as they have the iPhone me-too.
Sure enough, the New York Times reports, Eric the Silicon Leprechaun told friends at a recent party in Los Angeles about the new device, which would exclusively run the Android operating system. People with direct knowledge of the project - who did not want to be named because they were unauthorized to speak publicly about the device - said the company had been experimenting in "stealth mode" with a few publishers to explore delivery of books, magazines, and other content on a tablet.
It's not that Eric the Craven is a wrong-way Corrigan who doesn't "get it" - it's that (while he does indeed "get it") - he pretends not to, laying back like a snake in the grass when actually developing his own insider-based competitive products in his trademark "stealth mode."
The problem is Eric is unable to take a page from John Milton's character from "The Devil's Advocate" wherein he tells young Kevin Lomax to never let your enemies see you coming. With Eric, everyone but Eric sees him coming - and all the while Eric continues like the Iago he is, unable to tell that his backside is so exposed.
No wonder Steve Jobs, in effect smarting from Eric's duplicituous stabbing of Apple, may well have opined like did Antony of Brutus's treachery in stabbing Caesar, "...and this, Ericius, was the most unkindest cut of all."
While Steve may well deign to have coffee in public with Ericius when it suits his purpose, he will hardly allow Ericius the scorpion the opportunity to sting Apple again, saving Ericius the need to explain why he would sting anything ferrying him across a pond he would otherwise be unable to navigate on his own. As Jobs famously summarized, "We did not enter the search business, they entered the phone business."
When the scorpion explains why he treacherously stings an ally, he must be unaware of his own evil, merely excusing the act to be the natural result of some unintentional innate urge (re: the scorpion's reply to the toad as they both sank, "It's in my nature!").
Naturally, it is only fitting that Google would have a mantra like "Don't be evil," while all the while being only that at its highest echelons (and no doubt being quite unaware of it themselves - even though it is obvious to any reasonable observer).
Again, as Jobs has famously uttered, "...one more thing. This [Google] don't be evil mantra: It's bullsh*t!"
But now I think these examples may be more like watching Charley Sheen (as some may have had the recent opportunity to see him self-destruct). You wanted to look away but somehow it was remarkable to see someone say the things he did (some remarks seemed quite considered) and go down that road of self-destruction in the manner he did. Somewhat similar - I suppose - to being a "rubbernecker" over here on the California highways when passing the unfortunate circumstances of another human being. You know you shouldn't look but are tempted to take a peek if you can do so without slowing traffic or creating a danger yourself (something that perhaps can't be done in the long run anyway).
At any rate, two new Sheens have popped up on the Wrong-Way Radar screen and I am cretin enough to document them here below for posterity.
Echoing his boss's (Steve Ballmer - see above) earlier dismissive take on Apple's success as nothing more than a "rounding error," the erstwhile Mundie quashed the debate once and for all - to any who might have previously questioned his credentials to be the leader responsible for research and strategy for Microsoft - by being equally dismissive of Apple's petty little feat of selling (to actual end-users) 15 million first generation iPads and being on track to far surpass this with the iPad2.
In what can only be described as "pure genius" [as it is defined in Redmond], Mundie summed it all up for posterity when he stated "Today you can see tablets and pads and other things that are starting to live in the space between (a PC and a smartphone). Personally, I don't know whether that space will be a persistent one or not." This is because Mundie believes the successor will not be a smartphone or an iPad, but a "room" (didn't I see this concept already lampooned in the film "Back to the Future" - ahem!)?
Showing why Dell is at the point they're at today (due no doubt in part to the fact that they only recruit and hire the best), Lark trained his deeply analytic powers on the situation at Cupertino and delivered the following divination "The challenge they've got is that already Android is outpacing them. Apple is great if you've got a lot of money and live on an island. It's not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things can become quite complex." Lark explained.
When asked to expound on so deep a thought, the great man stopped briefly on his triumphant stride from the speaker's podium and fixed the obviously ignorant interviewer with a sad stare. Explaining in the simplest terms that even an Apple fanboy could understand, Lark thundered the following inescapable logic: "It's the high cost of additional accessories for the iPad that makes the tablet inaccessible. An iPad with a keyboard, a mouse and a case [ed. note - overlook the fact that no PCs come with a cover either while ignoring the fact that the iPad doesn't need or want (in most cases) a keyboard or a mouse] and you'll be at $1500 or $1600; that's double of what you're paying," he patiently explained to the half-wit reporter. "That's not feasible" he stated, mercifully ending the explanation there, not wishing to embarrass Apple enthusiasts any further by continuing to dash their hopes that the iPad might one day be a success of which they could be proud.
It's nice to see Apple's competition take the initiative and show mercy when dealing with the crazed Apple RDF adherents that one sometimes comes across when dealing with technology people can't live without. In all fairness, he could have - AND DIDN'T - point out the obvious - that besides the mouse and keyboard and covers, Lark graciously did not point out that by adding the equally obvious add-on of a Mercedes CL-Class automobile, it would have really put it over the top and unquestionably into a category that ordinary people just couldn't afford.
Oh, to be Richard Cory (er - I mean Andy Lark!) ...
19. Last fall, Acer's chairman JT Wang predicted that Apple's share of the tablet market would plunge from near 100 percent to just 20 to 30 percent because of the "closed platform" of Apple's iPad iOS, noting confidence in Android in saying that it "simply need a little more time before it turns strong."
Now this...
Stan Shih, the founder of Acer, the second largest PC maker globally, has acknowledged that the company must overhaul its operations to focus on profit margins rather than market share in reaction to the success of Apple.
To this...
Acer Corp. Chief Executive Gianfranco Lanci resigned Thursday, as his company looks to reorganize in an effort to take on the iPad and other tablets like it. The company hopes to find a permanent successor by the end of April.
Lanci's exist was put in context on Friday by DigiTimes, which noted that the impact from Apple products was a "key reason" for his departure. Could JT Wang be in the wings?
In it this wrong way Corrigan actually quotes other luminary Wrong-Ways, pontificating on why the Apple stores are such a bad idea. I think that their comments are most illuminating about the attitudes that still reside today in many of these technology companies. To wit:
"Apple's problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers," gripes former Chief Financial Officer Joseph Graziano. Note that this is a FORMER Chief Financial Officer. No wonder!
"I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," says David A. Goldstein, president of researcher Channel Marketing Corp.
"When you choose to compete with your retailers, clearly that's not a comfortable situation," says CompUSA Chief Operating Officer Lawrence N. Mondry. Note - has anybody seen a Comp USA lately? I didn't think so!
"They are the most secretive company I've ever done business with," says one top retailer. "They should let the news leak out, to convince the world how exciting their stuff is. That's how everyone else does it. Maybe it's time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently." Our friend - that savvy analyst Cliff Edwards again, summing it all up with the wisdom of the day.
And the beat(down) goes on.