Not yet a year into Rory Read’s term and the AMD board must be considering that the value of the x86 patents and engineering talent is worth much more than the stocks $3B valuation and easier to fathom putting on the auction block than continuing to sell $25 processors into the back channels of China and the Developing World. As I read… Read More
Behind great humor often lies irony. In the midst of a struggle by the European Union to extract $1.3B from Intel in an ages old Anti-Trust case, the latter makes a strategic move to embolden the Dutch firm ASML to accelerate the development of 450mm and EUV and thus save a continental jewel. What now say EU? When disfunction and bankruptcy… Read More
A Bloomberg article from early July caught my eye as it portends further changes in the competitive mobile market landscape. Intel is now in the business of paying Taiwanese panel suppliers to ensure the supply of touch-screen panels for PC ultrabooks. In essence it says that to win in the PC market, Intel has to mimic Apple and go … Read More
Microsoft is in trouble. Many of you already know that. Steve Ballmer has one last opportunity to set the company on a growth path or they will retreat into IBM legacy mode… ala the post 1990s Lou Gerstner era. And so they introduce a large tablet-convertible in direct competition with their PC partners Dell and HP. The End Game is coming… Read More
News today is that Moody’s has downgraded Nokia to junk status. They also announced that they will lay off 10,000 people (including about 1 in 4 of the people they employ in Finland, where Nokia is headquartered).
For those of you who don’t know all the inside-baseball stuff about Nokia, here is a recent little history.… Read More
Black Swan Events are not to be embraced, they are to be feared, if conventional wisdom holds true. And yet, the 2011 Black Swan that slammed the PC market (i.e. the Thailand Floods that wiped out a large part of the disk drive market) has turned out to be the key catalyst for reshaping the semiconductor industry in 2012 and 2013. Instead… Read More
The speed with which The Mobile Tsunami engulfs the old PC Market is just incredible. 18 months ago the tablet and smartphone markets were considered a Green Field of Opportunity for PC OEMs and chip suppliers to graze in for the next decade. The fences, however, are closing in fast as Apple continues to drive its iOS empire into new… Read More
As Apple races towards $200B in revenue, sometime in 2013 and perhaps $300B by 2015, Tim Cook knows it is in Apple’s best interests to start building a sizeable percentage of iPhones and iPADs in the US and soon. At the All Things D conference this week, Walt Mossberg asked Cook about Apple’s manufacturing presence in China and “if … Read More
Just days after I posted a blog on an early September iPhone 5 launch, the spies from Asia started flooding the rumor mills with Apple supply chain maneuvers that are not easily hidden suggesting that D-Day logistics are farther along than we imagined. This flood of information, coupled with the heightened Samsung-Apple Battle… Read More
Four years ago, a VC friend of mine was invited to a get together with a prominent Hedge Fund Manager from the Midwest. The meeting was an arrangement between fellow Harvard Grads. The Fund Manager was looking to make investments in the valley, to diversify away from his heavily weighted financial positions. Though, not recognized… Read More
