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Yeesh. Are you sure you really want to call attention to that particular oeuvre?

Timing is everything in life and had he waited 2 more days to post, he would have again saved himself the inevitable embarrassment of this being affirmed on Thursday.

“Analysts”. Huh. OK. MSN Money?

This could cost the company about $1 billion in lost revenue over the next three years, analysts estimate.

He then cherry picks sentences from the post to make the math seem impossible.

But if you want to go another round, the Macalope’s got the time. His nightly frolic with the nymphs doesn’t start for another hour.

Yeah, OK, starting to see a trend here. Well, “analysts”, whoever you are, as the Macalope’s 9th grade chemistry teacher Mr. Robinson was fond of saying, “Please show your work. Because it’s bound to be pretty funny.”

So, now it is CNET taking swipes at yours truly for having the audacity to doubt all things Apple (AAPL).

Comparing Apple sales that until recently were only in the US would have been unfair.

A $599 phone will not gain mass acceptance no matter what it does…

Yes, let’s.

Yeah, and that’s all got to be the iPhone, right? It’s not like Apple makes anything else that uses flash memory.

One last thing… he has not mentioned in any of his “posts” that my call before the first phone was sold on the need to drop the price of it was DEAD ON….

The growing usage of unlocked phones could cost Apple $1 billion in lost revenue over three years, analysts said.

Then he moves on to question (mock) my thought that Apple’s cutting back on component orders can only mean sales are going to slow.

See, you wrote:

He then goes into some wandering diatribe about Research in Motion (RIMM) or Google (GOOG) coming out with new products somehow does not matter or should be dismissed? I can’t figure out what the point was.

It is unfortunate but he based the whole article (rant) on the flawed assumption I made the number up.

Well, or maybe China mobile has figured they can put 400,000 iPhones on their network without paying Apple a dime, why negotiate a deal and start paying them now?

Can we be clear on what the Macalope was questioning (mocking)? He was questioning (mocking) the implication that this is somehow surprising. The first quarter is always slower than the fourth quarter and, yes, Apple has cut that already lowered estimate even further. Of course, you can’t tell how much of that is because of iPods and how much is because of iPhones, but the Macalope fully admits that
iPhone orders might be lower than hoped for in the first quarter. It’s not exactly like the economy and/or the tech sector is going gangbusters.

Well, thanks, Todd. That’s really nice.

Is this thing on? Test. One, two. Check. Check. Check.

Let’s move on:

And you certainly wouldn’t want to be that!

Todd, this actually proves the Macalope’s point, not yours. If there’s no way they can get the favorable revenue sharing they get from AT&T then how is Apple supposedly forgoing it?

Hm, a 34-company committee overseeing an open-source suite of mobile software. What could possibly go wrong.

Well, the Macalope wasn’t aware it was his job to run around patting you on the back for your brilliance. Why is he supposed to keep track of all of your posts when you clearly don’t keep track of his?

The Macalope knows that other firms get revenue sharing, but that’s not even the point. The point is, as you note, that Apple gets more revenue sharing because of exclusivity. What the Macalope is saying is that the $1 billion figure is simply a bogus multiplication of the revenue Apple gets from AT&T times the number of unlocked phones times the number of years. You can’t do that. If you open the phone up to multiple carriers in a single market, the revenue sharing number is going to drop like a rock.

The New York Times:

The irony here is that had I done a post that claimed Apple was a distant third in market share, I am sure his response would have been to attack me for an unfair comparison.

But, anyway, Todd, the fact of the matter is, the Macalope can’t ignore the rest of the world, scary numbers or not. And your contention that while the Macalope pointed out that Apple was third he would have said it was unfair if you had done so really doesn’t hold any water. Because, you know, it was the Macalope who pointed it out. See?

To which the Macalope responded:

Uh, yeah, see the thing is, Todd, if you click through to those links you provide, they don’t show the math either. Or even name a name.

There are two ways to play this game. One is to open up your phone to every provider, sell a mess of them but get very little extra per phone sold. The other is to lock it to one provider, sell fewer phones but get a whole lot extra per phone. Apple’s predilection when entering a market is lower volume and higher margin. And when you’re a company that puts emphasis on selling products that “just work” (or, at least, “just work” better than your competitors’ products), starting with one provider makes more sense. None of this discussion takes into account the changes AT&T needed to make to enable visual voicemail and, more importantly, the control over the user experience it ceded to Apple (activation alone was a huge sea change — moving it from the store to the customer’s home). Other carriers were reportedly not willing to make such concessions, but it was critical for Apple because ease of use is one of its primary differentiators.

The Macalope’s not sure how that would be possible as you didn’t actually do the math in your post. More to the point, though, what he said was that the particulars of the math didn’t even really matter, because the underlying premise stinks.

To quote: “Apple has slashed its 2008 NAND order forecast significantly and has informed suppliers that its demand growth will slow in 2008.” OUCH…

For Apple, the booming overseas market for iPhones is both a sign of its marketing prowess and a blow to a business model that could be coming undone, costing the company as much as $1 billion over the next three years, according to some analysts.

This one is priceless…..

Long-time readers may remember that as the post you’re referencing as the one where you also said that no one wanted an all-in-one device and that you wanted to be able to drive your family down the highway, listen to music and talk on the phone all at the same time.

See, you’re still acting like this is “news”. It’s not. Again, this recent report confirms the previous report which confirms what Apple said in its conference call with investors in January.

“Some analysts”. Hmm. Well, that’s not terribly elucidating. How about CNN?

Sullivan’s site, incidentally, has those awesome keyword ads that everyone loves so much that pop up all over the place like whack-a-moles that just hit a vein of underground crack. As Merlin Mann has noted, they are really useful for first-time visitors to the site because they’re a quick way of knowing you won’t ever be back.

Well, the Macalope doesn’t know about “the best”. It was OK, he supposes. Good for a Wednesday night. But “best”? Hmm. That’s kind of asking a lot, Todd. It’s not like yours was very good. Why should the Macalope have to do all the work?

As for doubting all things Apple, please note that the Macalope has been known to agree with criticism of the fine folks in Cupertino from time to time. He just asks that it make sense.

Now, some of the Macalope’s antler scratching over Todd’s “analysis” probably stems from the fact that he says he was only considering the U.S. market. Frankly, the Macalope didn’t catch that assumption, probably because it’s not spelled out anywhere. It does explain why he said RIM was #1 and it conveniently allows him to dodge the embarrassment of having to explain why he thought all 10 million iPhones had to be sold to existing AT&T customers. (And even then, he got the number of AT&T cellular customers wrong, saying it was 47 million in May of last year. At the end of April of 2007, AT&T had 62 million wireless customers. But that’s really beside the point.)

Actually, CNet takes no responsibility for the Macalope’s writings. They were really clear about that! So, the Macalope’s words are his own.

As for the gPhone which you spookily allude to, the Macalope will just quote Panic Software’s Steven Frank:

Is there something wrong with selling phones in only a handful of countries and still being third in the world? That sounds pretty darn good. Why is the horny one supposed to have some kind of problem with that?

The point is, Apple will also come out with new products. Everyone will come out with new products. The fact that one phone maker will come out with a new product means nothing unless you know something about those future products that makes them inherently better than the other company’s future products. And, as you admit, you know nothing.

The Macalope did not. He based the whole article (rant) on the assumption that the number is based on crappy assumptions. You didn’t make it up, you just took it at face value because it fit this preconceived idea you’ve been humping for the last year.

On his own site now, Todd Sullivan fires back at the Macalope, asking Is That The Best You Got?

If there’s another way to come up with such a ridiculously large number, the Macalope is all ears and antlers. If only we could track down “some analysts”…

Where did the number come from? Apparently he has never heard of these little publications called the New York Times, or CNN or MSN Money? Too bad because had he even attempted to read them, he would have found the sources of the numbers and save a whole lot of typing and embarrassment.

Responding to the Macalope’s example of unlocked phones in China, Sullivan says:

All cell providers have revenue share agreements. They have them with software developers, providers, wireless companies etc.. it is the way the industry functions. It is the degree of the revenue share that dictates the exclusivity in Apple’s case.

Looks like the Macalope actually agreed with you on that particular point! Yay! We both win! High fives all the way around!

Todd, Todd, Todd, Todd, Todd, Todd, Todd!

Then a couple of days later they wrote back and said “Hey, that’s just a fancy way of saying ‘chopped liver’!” And then we all had a good laugh. Ha-ha!

Like a monkey typing on a keyboard, you’ve finally typed something that’s true.

See, the Macalope used to take a somewhat U.S.-centric view and a number of readers outside the States wrote in and said “Hey! Goober! What are we, chopped liver?!” And the Macalope said, “No, indeed, dear international readers. You are not chopped liver. You are foie gras.” And they said “That’s better!”

Mitsubishi’s TV will have the chips embedded in the TV, and will come with a separate receiver unit that can send and receive uncompressed HD video signals up to 100 feet away. That means you can keep the receiver in a room downstairs or in a cabinet–no line of sight necessary.

Wireless chipmaker Amimon is set to announce Thursday that Mitsubishi will use its technology to send high-definition TV signals to its latest LCD TV without wires. It will come in 40-inch and 46-inch sizes. The 40-inch model will cost 300,000 yen (or $2,731), and the 46-inch model will sell for 400,000 yen ($3,642).

Mitsubishi will be joining the rarefied ranks (in TV anyway) of Sony and Samsung in offering wireless television.

Mitsubishi's foray into wireless HDTV.

But it’s been a long time coming, and it will be even longer before this is a mainstream product category. Amimon said recently it sees that happening in three to five years.

(Credit:
Amimon)

Here’s the catch–it’s being released in Japan only this fall. However, it’s likely Mitsubishi will broaden distribution of this TV. Wireless HD video is a category that Amimon–which heads a consortium of chipmakers and consumer electronics companies pushing for a whole-home wireless TV standard called Wireless HDI–and others have been talking up for a while.

Other companies, such as Aircell, which uses a network of some 92 antenna towers across the country to transmit wireless signals to planes flying above, and Row44, which provides in-flight Internet service via satellite, have been pushing forward despite Connexion’s failure. Both of these companies use Wi-Fi routers inside planes to provide broadband access to passengers.

I’m not sure if the issues she experienced were because JetBlue’s LiveTV network was overloaded or because there was something wrong with the Wi-Fi router configuration on the plane. Or perhaps there wasn’t enough broadband capacity being piped into the plane. All of these things could impact performance and could ultimately affect whether people are willing to pay the additional $10 or $13 to access the Internet on their flights.

American Airlines will initially enable 15 of its 767s with broadband, and eventually it will offer Internet connectivity on 500 planes. Virgin plans to provide broadband on all its planes, according to a blog posted on GigaOm Tuesday.

Several carriers, including American Airlines, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines, and Southwest, have already said they would test broadband service on their planes using one of these two service providers. And in December, JetBlue demonstrated its in-flight broadband, delivered via a JetBlue subsidiary called LiveTV, on a flight from New York to San Francisco.

Airlines have been talking about offering in-flight broadband for years. But so far the service hasn’t really gotten off the ground (forgive the pun, I couldn’t resist). Boeing was the first to come up with a service, called Connexion, which debuted in 2004 on a few international carriers including, Lufthansa, SAS, All Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines, and Singapore Airlines.

The second major factor is ensuring the quality and speed of the service. If people are paying for Internet access, the network better work and it better work well. Unfortunately, I’m a little skeptical that the service on these planes will work as expected. My colleague Caroline McCarthy, who was onboard JetBlue’s New York to San Francisco Wi-Fi test flight, wasn’t impressed with the Internet service.

She had trouble connecting to the network and was only able to access “light” versions of services like Yahoo Mail.

The reason Verizon got out of the in-flight phone business was simple. People weren’t using the service because it was too expensive. Verizon charged non-Verizon customers $3.99 to connect domestic calls and $4.99 for each additional minute. International calls required a connection fee of $5.99 and $5.99 for each minute of calling.

I don’t have to check e-mail, file stories, or post blogs from 45,000 feet. I can kick back, watch a movie, read a magazine, or take a snooze. And of course, without broadband or cell phone service on planes, I also don’t have to be subjected to listening to my seat-mate’s annoying phone conversations.

Finally, American Airlines and Virgin America are offering a commercial in-flight broadband service.

Aircell’s service is priced much more reasonably. At $10 and $13, the price point could appeal to business travelers. After all, many travelers pay Boingo $9.95 for Internet access in airports. If Aircell could strike a deal with Boingo or some other aggregator like T-Mobile, it could make the service even more compelling in terms of price.

But the service was canceled in 2006 when the company was unable to find business among domestic airlines. A big problem with Connexion was that the entire system was bulky and weighed around 400 pounds, making it nearly impossible for it to be used on smaller domestic planes.

Aircell, a company that sells air-to-ground telecommunications equipment to airlines, said this week that its in-flight broadband system will be used on some Virgin America and American Airlines flights originating from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York and Miami.

Editor’s note: This blog initially misidentified the provider of JetBlue’s in-flight broadband service.

So, I am interested to see the initial real-world user response to these services. But I have to admit that I secretly hope they are a disappointment. Even though I know having broadband access on a plane could make me much more productive when I travel between New York and San Francisco, where CNET is headquartered, airplanes have been the last bastion of solitude for me as a business traveler.

In-flight broadband is coming soon for travelers on some American Airlines and Virgin America flights. But will the companies hit the right price point to attract customers?

In 2006, Verizon Communications exited the in-flight telephone service business, which it had inherited from GTE. The service had been operational for more than 20 years.

The new service, called Gogo, will cost $12.95 for cross-country flights and $9.95 for flights lasting three hours or less.

How much are people willing to pay?
Now, the true test will be whether passengers actually use the service. And that will depend on several factors. The first is price. How much are people willing to pay for in-flight broadband? Judging from the in-flight phone business, not that much.

Let me know what you think about in-flight broadband in the “TalkBack” section below this story. Is $13 too much for you to pay?

“If BetaBlue’s connection were my home ISP, I’d ask them to cancel my subscription,” she writes. “It was hardly ultra-reliable, and the instant-messaging application took quite a bit of time to boot up.”

(Credit:
AP)

The Associated Press has brought to the foreground the issue of “fair use” related to taking snippets from articles, according to an article in The New York Times.

The AP, for its part, should recognize that they and their members now live in a new media ecology constructed of links, one they do not and cannot control any longer. To be good citizens in this new economy, the AP should respect the rights of readers who write and recognize the benefits of receiving links and credit, as the bloggers give it. They should further extend this ethic to their own work. And if there is conflict or questions, their reflex should not be to send their lawyers to write letters. Remember that you are dealing with individuals, not corporations. This was a hostile act and that is why it was met in return with hostility, deservedly so.

Jim Kennedy, a seasoned journalist who is an AP vice president and director of strategic planning, is making the case that some blogs and content outlets are excerpting the “essence of an article,” which he said should instead be encapsulated in very few words. The AP plans to come up with guidelines for excerpting from its news stories.

Kennedy said that the spirit of the Internet is linking. But it is also excerpting snippets. Fundamentally, the Web is a content “refactory,” in which new material is factored out of antecedent matter and connected in an information “web” via links and snippets.

Bloggers should not quote excessively from others’ content and when they quote it should be for a reason–to agree, disagree, comment on, recommend, correct (there can be many reasons). This is fair use and fair comment. There can be no word-count limit because it depends on the use. If I want to fisk a story, I may well quote the whole thing because I am commenting on it all. The test is reasonableness: a fuzzy test, but life is fuzzy.

In The New York Times story, Professor Timothy Wu of the Columbia University Law School says, “The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story.”

Here is an except and a link to what Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism, had to say about this issue:

Jim Kennedy

There is a fuzzy line regarding “fair use” and how much excerpted content is fair. But most bloggers use common sense and extract snippets and provide links to make a point, not to create substitute for the story. I do find CNET News.com stories fully reproduced on sites, but they are the exception and clearly a violation of copyright.

The AP or any other source of so-called original content that is built partly on preexisting content easily accessible on the Internet can either participate in the Web refactory and live with the fuzziness, or become a pariah.

Should Yahoo hit the low end of its range, especially in light of Google’s financial results, Microsoft may have a stronger argument for keeping its offer where it is, say Wall Street soothsayers.

Based on a consensus of Wall Street analysts, Yahoo is expected to report net income of 9 cents a share on revenue of nearly $1.33 billion, according to Thomson Financial.

Microsoft has hired Bryan Cave Strategies to lobby its case with federal regulators, according to an Associated Press report. The software giant is hoping lobbyists will aid its efforts in getting regulators to give a nod to a Yahoo merger, proxy fight or no proxy fight.

The question on investors minds is whether Yahoo on Tuesday will report results that are on the low end of the range, or the high end. Expectations for hitting the upper end may have just increased, given Google’s performance for the quarter.

While waiting for Yahoo to decide whether it will enter into a friendly merger or tempt fate with a proxy fight, Microsoft has not been sitting idle.

And as the parties next week head toward the last leg of a three-week deadline Microsoft issued to Yahoo to do a deal, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hasn’t lost his sense of humor.

Yahoo earlier told Wall Street that it expects to post revenue within its previously forecast range of $1.28 billion to $1.38 billion.

When only a handful of hands went up, according to the Reuters report, Ballmer quipped: “Wow! We offered 31 bucks a share.”

While it’s not clear whether Yahoo has taken similar action and hired lobbyists over the Microsoft bid, Google is not resting on its laurels, according to the AP story. Google has hired the Franklin Square Group to aid with “competition issues in the Internet industry,” the AP cited from a disclosure form Franklin filed with the Senate public records office.

With Google blowing past Wall Street’s numbers for the quarter Thursday, expectations may rise for Yahoo, which reports its first-quarter results next week.

And as has been reported a number of times, if Yahoo hits the high end of its range and issues a strong forecast, it may bolster its argument that Microsoft should pony up more than its initial cash-stock bid, valued at $31 a share. (For full coverage, see “Microsoft’s big bid for Yahoo.”)

Although Google’s share soared as much as 12 percent in after-hours trading to tip past the $500-a-share range, Yahoo climbed less than 1 percent to $28.26 per share. In regular market hours, Yahoo ended the day down slightly at $28.03 a share.

As he addressed a crowd of nearly 2,000 people at a Seattle technology conference Thursday, he asked the group how many relied on Yahoo as their main search engine, according to a Reuters report.

Sen. Barack Obama has already proven himself to be the most popular presidential candidate on the Internet, what with his more than 1.3 million Facebook supporters and lofty aims of 2 million online donors. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee is not only outshining other politicians on the Internet, but also the very stars of social networking–Obama has just overtaken Kevin Rose’s spot as the most followed person on Twitter, according to Twitterholic.

But for all those followers, there just may be a few who don’t feel sufficiently networked with the candidate. For those who want to be in-the-know about all things Obama–like his VP choice–a millisecond before millions of others, the candidate reminds us to sign up for his text message alerts.

By Twitterholic’s last count, Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with Rose’s 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends on Twitter–59,338–according to Twitterholic, which calculates individual statistics for each Twitter user a couple of times a day. The candidate’s Twitter page offers up such rousing tidbits of news as “Holding a town hall on economic security in St. Petersburg, FL.”

But even some of the company’s showcase early adopter customers are moving more slowly to Vista than originally planned. Continental Airlines said in June of last year that it expected to have 7,000 to 10,000 desktops moved to the operating system by the end of last year. As of May, it had only shifted about 2,600 machines to Vista. Continental now expects the majority of its machines to be on Vista by the end of this year, according to a recent white paper.

In a new study, Forrester Research uncovers some good news for Microsoft: Vista usage among businesses is up by more than 40 percent since January. The bad news: still, less than 10 percent of the 2,300 companies surveyed use Vista.

Microsoft has been touting the fact that Vista adoption is actually on par with past releases, pointing to some new customers, such as the U.S. Air Force. Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte told CNET News on Wednesday that at the end of June, Vista was actually tracking slightly ahead of Windows XP in corporate adoption at the same stage in its lifecycle.

Expect to hear more about Vista adoption from Microsoft later on Thursday, when Veghte takes the stage at the company’s financial analyst meeting in Redmond, Wash. CNET’s Ina Fried is on the scene and will be reporting throughout the day.

(Credit:
ProhibitOnions/Coca-Cola)

“Windows 7 is penciled for release in Q1 2010. And who knows, by then, Apple may have even gotten its enterprise act together,” Mendel writes.

In the report, Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel writes that Vista is “New Coke,” and sees a strong case for bypassing the release altogether.

More troubling for Microsoft may be the fact that most of those Vista installs are replacing versions of Windows other than Windows XP, which remains popular with both businesses and consumers. Forrester says 87.1 percent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP.