In the Apple economy, only Apple gets really rich

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This morning’s Observer column.

Microsoft is a huge and important company. But guess what? It’s in danger of being dwarfed by an outfit that it once regarded as a joke. In terms of market capitalisation, Apple passed Microsoft ages ago. When I last checked, Apple was valued at $364bn, compared with Microsoft’s $230.5bn. And at the moment, there is only one other corporation in the world – Exxon Mobil – that is bigger than Apple.

Last week, Apple unveiled results that suggest even Exxon may not be safe from the relentless growth of Steve Jobs’s empire. Apple made a net profit of $7.31bn on revenues of $28.57bn for the quarter ending in June. That's the best three months it’s ever had, with revenues up 82% and profits up 125%. The company also revealed that it’s sitting on a $76bn cash mountain. Just to put that in context, Apple could currently buy both Tesco and BT and still have some loose change. The news sparked an 8% rise in the share price, with the stock breaking the $400 barrier for the first time.

So is Apple the new Microsoft? Answer: no – and the quarterly results explain why…

LATER: Even stranger is the revelation that Apple has more cash in hand than the US Federal government.

HP’s tablet dilemma: how to be runner-up.

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Andrew Orlowski has an interesting piece in The Register about HP’s new tablet. It opens with this striking para.

After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple’s 30-year-old personal computer division. It’s almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of “ends” a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.

Inch: the inside story.

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Inch: the inside story., originally uploaded by jjn1.

We were in Kerry a few weeks ago when I was giving the opening Keynote at the IIUG annual conference in Tralee. Afterwards we went for a walk on the beach at Inch — and had tea in the charming cafe (run by an Egyptian: how cosmopolitan is that!). This picture was taken in very demanding conditions because of the discrepancy between the darkness of the interior and the brightness outside. What’s impressive is how the HDR Pro App for the iPhone deals with it.

The iPad and time-shifted reading

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Fascinating TechCrunch post by Erick Schonfeld on how the iPad changes people’s reading habits.

One of the reasons bookmarking apps like Read It Later and Instapaper are becoming so popular is because we are inundated with news and interesting links all day long, but have no time to read them. But just as DVRs helps us shift our TV viewing to better fit our own schedules, these apps helps us time shift our online reading. And according to some data put out earlier this month by Read It Later, it looks like the iPad is becoming the time-shifting reading device of choice.

Read It Later offers a bookmarklet which enables one to ‘save’ a Web page for offline reading on an iPad. The people who run the service surveyed the bookmarking habits of its users over the course of a day. The rate of bookmarking was pretty uniform in the period 7am – 6pm but drops off sharply after 9pm. They then looked at when iPad users read the articles they have saved and found that the time reserved for reading is shifted all the way to the right, with the sweet spot being between 7 PM and 11 PM at night. This suggests, they say, that “iPad usage is competing with primetime TV for people’s attention (or that they watching TV with iPad in hand, or shifting their TV viewing to other times).”

This is intriguing — and squares with my own experience. Instapaper is one of the Apps I use — and value — most.

Thanks, Marshall, I think we’ve finally got the message…

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This morning’s Observer column.

“A prophet is not without honour”, says the Bible, “save in his own country.” This was manifestly not true in the case of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian cultural critic, who was born 100 years ago last Thursday, and was famous not only in his own country, but also abroad. In fact, he’s the only public intellectual I can think of who played himself in a Woody Allen movie.

Film buffs will recall the wonderful sequence in Annie Hall, where Woody and Diane Keaton are queuing for a movie when a guy behind them starts opining pompously about McLuhan’s description of television as a “high intensity or hot medium”. Allen expresses to camera a desire to have a large sock full of horse manure close to hand, whereupon the guy asserts his right to express his opinion on the grounds that he teaches a course at Columbia on “TV, media and culture”, a fact that – he asserts – gives his views on McLuhan a great deal of validity.

“That’s funny,” replies Woody, “because I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here.” He goes over to a flipchart and pulls out the great man himself from behind it. “I heard what you were saying, “says McLuhan to the Columbia man. “You know nothing of my work… how you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” The scene closes with Woody saying to camera: “Boy, if life were only like this.”

As it happens, there have been many times in the past few years when it would have been useful to have had McLuhan to hand because, in a strange way, his insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s when he sprang into prominence…

See also this post.