Disjointed Kitsch

Back in June/July Apple had it’s financial 3rd quarter QA with analysts and the media. One item in particular caught my eye and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. In response to a question from Ben Reitzes of UBS regarding margin guidance for the current quarter, Peter Oppenheimer of Apple said:

Ben, we gave you guidance that we have reasonable confidence in achieving. Regarding the gross margin, I have guided it down to 29.5% as a result primarily of three factors. We’re going to run the back-to-school promotion for most of the quarter, a great promotion for the company and brings us each year many new customers, but it is an expensive one. We do expect to see higher commodity costs and I will let Tim comment on that in a moment; and we have some product transitions that I can’t get into.

It was the “product transitions” part that got me. What product transisions could be in the works that they would “guide down” the gross margin? I wasn’t the only one that found it a curious statement. My thought at the time was it had to be iPhone related unless they were drastically reshaping their notebook or desktop lines. BTW, I’m no financial analyst, but I do watch Apple since they’ve been a part of my job for the past 25 years.

With Wednesday’s announcement of the iPod Touch, and the price reduction of the 8MB iPhone/elimination of the 4MB model followed by Thursday’s announcement of the $100 credit for iPhone customers I think it’s failry clear what the Peter meant by “product transition” issues.

My question is not so much the iPod Touch intro or the price reduction/elimination in the iPhone line since Apple would have factored that into their current quarter guidance. It’s the $100 credit for the early adopter iPhone customers that has me thinking, was the entire “mea culpa” planned? I’m not a conspiracy theorist at heart but it does make me go “hummmm…..”

phpGedView - Looks pretty cool - social content meets a social activity. Manage your family’s genealogy on-line. I may have to try this on the Axsom genealogy site

OOXML Denied - So Microsfoft has to try again. I’m gald to see that the “on the merits” faction one out over the ballot stuffing/FUD crowd.

Apple - Busy week for the fruit company:

• iPhone Sales - looking good and that was before…
• iPhone Price Drop - gotta love that early adopter tax.. humm.. the IIvx comes to mind here, but better treatment seems to be in the works.
• Touch Pod - Finally - I can “touch” my iPod in ways never imagined!

New Google Items:

• Hosting and Deduping AP - Both hosting and duplicate removal although an actual “product” isn’t currently up is interesting. Coming from a news archive business the duplication problem, especially wire service stories like AP, is a challenging problem and in Google’s best interest to solve given how much news content they are aggregating. It’ll be interesting to see how they start to use AP articles/photos in a Google product. My bets on time-lines and following developing stories. Those “duplicates” have value in that some add regional/area info not in the original AP story.
• Book “clips” - I though “cool” when I first saw this but can’t we do the same with a screen shot?

Burning Man - Never saw this event before but it’s eating up the tech blog-sphere. Perhaps it’s just slow-news August playing out in blog land coupled with the heat.

New Journalism - A side issue as a result of the whole “burning man” thing is the way in which it’s being covered. It’s not on the traditional media outlets (TV/radio/print) but it is all over the blogs. Some interesting thoughts:

New Music - Great article by NYT Magazine on Rick Ruban and the music industry. As an iPod owner I like iTunes, but I could be persuaded to a subscription model based on artist, genre, etc. Worth the read.

Books

• Finished: Justice Denied, Paint it Black, Killing Rain
• Book Rentals- or swim as it were. I’ve been trying Bookins at $4.50/book but I can’t always get the book I want when I want it. Humm…

Fantasy Baseball - Keene Blackflys are still in 1st. Most of my starting pitching staff is gone and I’m almost entirely on relievers. I’m hoping my batters pick up the pace since I’m only out in front by less than 10 points with 3+ weeks to go.

Just a thought as I was reading a NYT Magazine article on Rick Rubin: The newspaper industry is at a crossroads just like the music industry- the traditional model is broken and a new model around blogs/feeds/personalized news is developing. Problem is that some of those new “news” outlets rely on being able to reference/refer to article from traditional media. Those articles are, more often that not, in pay-walled gardens. How can bloggers that need access to primary source material play nice with primary source publishers that need revenue for the goods they are producing?

I don’t think the AdWords ad model works here (at least all the time) since the primary source material may not be somthing suitable for AdWords targeting (think political commentary). If it was a home improvement article, AdWords based referal revenue might work, but a good chunk of content won’t. That got me thinking about article sponsorship. Would a company/group be willing to pony up money to allow open access coming from a blog to a pay-walled garden article in return for advertising/promotion/exposure? The blogger still sells ad space on his site using AdWords, etc.. but the paper brands the article with specific sponsor advertising. The sponsored advertising is only used when accessed via that blog. Users can still “pay per view” the article from the pay-walled garden and see no ad sponsorship or perhaps the entire article is sponsored and open for public view as long as the sponsor puts up the cash.

Either way the blogger gets access to the primary source material, the sponsor gets their name associated with the article and the paper makes more money on a good story.