Tag: ‘apple’ · TangleBones

Explaining AAPL

John Gruber writes:

Lately, the cor­re­la­tion between AAPL stock run-​ups and actual news regard­ing Apple is zero. Whereas most of the time there is any actual news, even news that to me seems good for Apple, the stock goes down.

Which is some­thing that I’ve been notic­ing for a while, and not just with Apple. It seems like the stock market responds to just about any news by pun­ish­ing the com­pany involved. Did you quar­terly results meet ana­lysts pre­dic­tions? The stock goes down. Did it beat them by too much? The stock goes down. That’s just strange.

But what’s down­right dumb is when  noth­ing hap­pens and the stock rises. How is that pos­si­ble. So here’s my theory: good news does make stock prices go up. But not when most traders first hear about it. To them, any­thing in the press is bad, so any­time they read about a com­pany, the stock goes down. But a week later when they talk to some­body smart enough to know what’s going on, the price starts creep­ing up.

The reason for the sudden dip is that there’s a small but sig­nif­i­cant number of day traders that are noth­ing but reac­tionary lem­mings. On the other hand, there are lots of smart people out there who slowly begin to fill in the larger mass of traders in on the good news. The thing is that the lem­mings all hear about the news at the same time, but the word of mouth fil­ters out slowly over a few weeks.

What do you think?

What’s wrong with technology pundits?

[Note: I'd answer the ques­tion "What's wrong with pun­dits?" but who has that kind of time?]

Respond­ing to an arti­cle by David Bor­lind, the Maca­lope writes:

…but one of the biggest prob­lems with the cur­rent state of pun­ditry is to con­fuse what the public wants with what the pundit wants. The two are not nec­es­sar­ily the same.

What both­ers me is that tech pun­dits all seem to be fea­ture obsessed. I guess the pro­gres­sion is some­thing like:

1. I have no idea how to com­pare these two products.
2. Oh wait, I can just make one of those cool tables that check off the features.
3. Ipso facto, Prod­uct A is better than Prod­uct B.

But they go far­ther than that, because this check-​box obses­sion colors all of their per­cep­tions, and you end up with market pre­dic­tions based on fea­ture lists. It’s all well and good to say, “I think you should buy Prod­uct A because it includes extra dongles,” or what­ever, but when you say, “Nobody will buy Prod­uct B because it lacks extra dongles,” you’re tread­ing on thin ice.

Espe­cially when Prod­uct B is made by Apple.

Haven’t these people gotten the memo? Apple isn’t famous for all the fea­tures they add to com­put­ers, they’re famous for leav­ing things out. Sure, they were among the first man­u­fac­tur­ers to ship all of their com­put­ers with USB ports, but every­body remem­bers the fact that they left floppy drives out of iMacs. Yes, they added video to iPods, but what’s more remark­able are the things they’ve never added: FM receivers, WMA sup­port, sub­scrip­tion ser­vices, dis­plays of meta-​data, remov­able bat­ter­ies, remov­able stor­age and plain old USB ports.

And they prob­a­bly never will.

What these people are for­get­ting is that most con­sumers don’t shop with fea­ture lists. Why do you think there are so many 480i TVs for sale? No sane person would buy one if they knew better, but that’s not how con­sumers shop. The jus­ti­fi­ca­tions I hear for buying con­sumer elec­tron­ics sound like:

• “I like the way this feels.”
• “I like the way this works.”
• “I like how much this costs.”

Any pundit that doesn’t under­stand these things needs to be fired. Aren’t there min­i­mum require­ments for these jobs?

Glowing Apple keyboard

Pho­tographed by Arkku

Yeah, I need one of these. Too bad I’ve already used up my yearly ration of luck with elec­tric­ity installing a light fixture.