A Businessman's View

With each new week, I worry just a little bit more that I'm boring my readers. After all, it seems like the same stuff surfaces each week in the news and, of course, I'm compelled to write about it. In a perverted way, I almost want to start my own hedge fund because it seems that the companies I've been writing about show up for a few weeks in a row and not for the right reasons. Take, for example, Dell computer. Two weeks ago I told you about a lawsuit against them for knowingly selling computers with faulty parts in them. Ironically, the law firm defending them was a victim of the same crime with over 1,000 defective computers from the company. This week, Dell is once again in the news but for other reasons. Apparently, it has been using subsidies paid to it by Intel to inflate its own earnings statements. In my personal opinion this should have never occurred but not because what it did was against the law. Instead, it is my opinion that the subsidies should ha...

I arrived in Dallas late last night and, when I got up this morning to check my email, I realized that I didn't write an entry yesterday. ("For shame!") What could I discuss today? Apple. They are becoming a piñata because of their missteps. Last week, they admitted there were issues; said they would give free bumpers to people who requested them; and then said that every phone has this same issue. Of course, the other phone manufacturers called bullshit on Apple and hit back rather hard. Goldman Sachs. They settled with the government; paid a $500mm fine (which is nothing to a company that practically mints their own dollars); and admitted no wrongdoing. I will be the one to call bullshit on this one and wonder aloud how our justice system is so screwed up that a major player in the financial meltdown essentially gets off with barely a slap on the wrist . These topics have been overexposed that I'm sure you're tired of them, so here's something comple...

After last week's entry, I received a fair amount of flack from readers complaining that I was anti-Apple and that the company's products really don't deserve the constant tongue lashing that the haters keep delivering. I can relate to their viewpoint: nearly 20 years ago I was berating the Windows lovers for hating OS/2, which was obviously a better operating system. It was frustrating because I was right on the technical points but I missed the bigger picture, which is that a company has an obligation to its user community to do the right thing. (IBM let the OS/2 user base down considerably back then, but that's a story for another day.) I'm not going to rehash last week's story, but I find it ironic that accusations have been leveled again against Apple after it appears that several iTunes accounts have been hacked . The Infoworld article describes how several hundred accounts have had unauthorized purchases made on behalf of the account owners, sometim...

Apple has finally " jumped the shark ." For those of you who aren't familiar with the idiom, it was originally coined in response to an episode of Happy Days when Fonzie jumps over a shark to prove his courage. Critics and viewers alike consider this point in the show's history to be the beginning of its decline. In general, the idiom is used to describe a moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. In my opinion, Apple is close to reaching that point if it hasn't already. Granted, Steve Jobs and Company have never been in the majority in terms of market share, but they've always had a rabidly fanatical following. Still, when you call your user community a bunch of idiots and fail to acknowledge that the real problem lies with your untouchable product then you start to sow the seeds of your own ruin. And this is exactly what has happened. CNN recently reported that Apple's response to users' complaints about cell phone reception ...