Disjointed Kitsch

I’ve been writing C programs for over 20 years, but more recently I’ve been writing them for Linux/Solaris systems. I’ve been writing my own Makefiles to get my source code to compile but always wondered how other source code maintainers go about creating the “./configure, make, make install” process.

So this morning with nothing better to do I investigated the GNU Autotools. Slogging though on-line manuals was tedious so I went looking for a tutorial and ended up finding one I liked. Autotools Tutorial for Beginners was just the sort of laid back tutorial I needed to grasp the basics so I could start using them on my own project.

I’ve been playing with VirtualBox on my Mac Mini the last couple of days and I’m impressed! Not only was I able to install an ancient version of Win95, I also installed my favorite Linux distro Gentoo.

Just downloaded the Gentoo livecd, created a Guest OS for it in VBox and followed the normal Gentoo stage 3 install process. Sweet!

One problem I had was how to talk to the Gentoo VBox install from my Mac host OS. The answer was port forwarding using VirtualBox’s command line tool VBoxManage.

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…..”

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.

Just about every day I hear a talking head spout “doom and gloom” or “best thing since sliced bread” on some subject. Could be the latest gadget or some political item or a person or whatever. It’s always one extreme or another.

What I’ve wanted to do for a long time is to keep track of these best/worst attributions and then review them 1-5 years later and see how they panned out. Well, at least one person bothered to record a “doom” statement on Apple Computer made by Michael Dell back in 1997 and I for one, “Fan Boy” that I am, hold up an example of the “doom” sayers being wrong:

Shut down Dell and give the money back to shareholders by ZDNet’s Jason D. O’Grady — In October 1997 at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97, Michael Dell was asked what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple Computer. Dell responded to an audience of several thousand IT executives “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.â€? According to Mac Daily News: A month later Steve Jobs responded […]

You can read the rest of the post to see the conclusion by Mr O’Grady, but suffice to say that with Apple’s stock closing up on perhaps the best quarter in their history and Apple’s market cap more than that of Dell’s and twice the value, perhaps it’s best not to piss off Mr Jobs.

Apple’s sale/demise has always been a subject of much discussion by the “doom-sayers”. One of these day’s the heads will stop talking Apple doom/gloom and start talking about Apple as they really are: an innovative, risk taking company that turn in a fairly consistent performance year after year and product after product and not a “flash in the pan”.