Apple will purchase close to eightBILLION dollars in parts from Samsung for the iSeries of products this year alone, making Apple Samsung’s largest customer. Samsung is also Apple’s largest competitor and TSMC’s most viable competitive foundry threat so it was no surprise to see Apple and TSMC team up on the next generations of… Read More
The retirement of Steve Jobs left most commentators wondering if Tim Cook could lead Apple marching ever onward and upward. In truth, Tim Cook’s contribution on the operations side has been just as instrumental in the destruction of Apple’s PC and consumer electronics competitors as Jobs’ product vision. Under Tim Cook’s guidance,… Read More
I am doing some consulting right now for a company that shall remain nameless, and one of the things I have had to look at is Apple’s supply chain. I came across an interesting article by someone with the goal to “buy a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple.” He is in the UK and doesn’t like Apple’s… Read More
“Where’s the Taurus?” In the history of company turnarounds, it was one of the most penetrating and catalyzing opening questions ever offered by a new CEO to a demoralized executive team. The CEO was Alan Mullaly, who spent years at Boeing and at one point in the 1980s studied the successful rollout of the original Ford Taurus. For… Read More
In a Washington Post Column this past Sunday, Barry Ritholtz, A Wall St. Money Manager and who has a blog called the Big Picture, recounts the destruction that Apple has inflicted on a wide swath of technology companies (see And then there were none). He calls it “creative destruction writ large.” Ritholtz though is only accounting… Read More
The complete destruction of the consumer PC market in the US and Europe is well within Apple’s grasp and will begin to unfold next summer. There is nothing that Intel, Microsoft or the retail channels can do to hold back the tsunami that was first set in motion with the iPad last year and comes to completion with the introduction of one… Read More
We received some good feedback from our article on Intel’s Back to the Future Buy of Micron and I thought I would present another story line that gives readers a better perspective of what may be possibly coming down the road. In this case, it is the story of AMD and Samsung partnering to counter Intel’s platform play with Micron. The… Read More
It was a series of Itanium Neutron Bombs detonating during the reign of 4 management teams (Platt, Fiorina, Hurd and Apotheker) that left HP campuses in Cupertino and Palo Alto in the custody of crickets. The devastation to employees and stockholders is absolutely immense and the current strategy calls for a further retreat into… Read More
Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, had an edict that each business unit needed to be #1 or #2 in the market or else he sold it off. HP is #1 in PC market share but it is exiting a business that it no longer can control and soon will bleed a lot of cash. HP’s Operating margin is under 6% and falling while Apple’s is at 40% and growing. So the question… Read More
In an interview that Gordon Moore gave in early 2000, the former co-founder of Intel recounted how they abandoned the DRAM market in the early 1980s in order to exit the increasingly unprofitable business and focus on the promising, yet still young x86 processor market. Intel was also home to EEPROM and NOR Flash, two memory technologies… Read More
