From Microsoft to Dell to Motorola, 2008 has been a very burdensome year for number-chasers. For those who find value in and thus only pay attention to market share, units shipped and revenue, the argument for volume is becoming increasingly more difficult to justify.

In What Sony Ericsson Must Do To Stage a Comeback, Jose Fermoso includes an interesting table:

In any argument advanced to show why, for instance, Nokia is trailing Apple in the smartphone market, some will always counter by pointing to Nokia's volume dominance in units shipped, which dwarfs Apple's by a factor of 25X. Nokia's revenue is about 1.5X higher than Apple's as well. What's more interesting for shareholders, however, is the fact that Apple's profit is more than 2X over Nokia's.

Indeed, for every phone sold in this scenario, Apple makes over 55X in profits compared to Nokia:

Make it up in volume?

The corollary to units shipped is often the notion of a platform: the larger it is, the more lucrative it usually gets. Once a product gains network effect, it often dominates a market and thus is able to siphon off most of the revenue in that market. Revenue without profit, unfortunately, is not very meaningful.

Motorola, for instance, has shipped an awful lot of RAZRs but its mobile division has been at the brink of going under. In the table above, Sony Ericsson is shown to lose over $10 for each phone sold. No wonder Sony is slated to become one of the casualties of the contraction in the cellphone market. Nokia is the volume leader, but its per-phone profit is a meager $6.64, versus Apple's $369.27.

Surely, products without significant market share will fail to create an ecosystem necessary to garner mind share, developer interest and, ultimately, users. Android is not yet a significant threat to iPhone because it doesn't nearly have a comparable ecosystem and because it doesn't have a significant ecosystem it hasn't been able to attract enough developers to create one. Google may be able to fund Android's growing pains, but a company like Palm cannot do the same for its upcoming Pre.

Profits matter

Pre has to compete directly against the iPhone. But while Palm continues to spiral downward financially quarter-by-quarter, its competitor Apple is very profitable, likely to have about $30 billion in cash by the time the first Pre is sold.

The most amazing trick Apple has performed over the last six years has been the unflinching fiscal discipline to introduce new products into new markets to establish new platforms while maintaining remarkably profitable margins. Apple hasn't carved out 3/4 of the digital music market by inundating it with cheap devices. Neither has it elected to chase after market share by peddling $49 "iPhone nanos" at Radio Shack. As can be seen above, the iPhone is an extremely profitable product which fuels its own R&D that keeps it a generation ahead of its potential rivals. In iPhone charts, third parties see not just the number of units sold but more importantly, a competently managed, profitable, growing ecosystem with which they can reliably associate, whereas any discussion of Pre's prospects must necessarily include Palm's dismal financial outlook.

Therein lies the magic of the iPhone numbers.

http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/1077700

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

]]> Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:55:12 -0800 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/1077700

http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/1077699

Third year student, Rob Moxon, is currently seeking work placements in and around the UK.

Spread the love! ]]> Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:55:12 -0800 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/1077699

http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/1077698

Look out below

There has been a distinct change in tone from the Obama team today, as they seem to have become suddenly aware that there's a real risk that the stimulus plan will either fail to pass, or be emasculated to the point that it doesn't come close to doing the job. Obama himself has warned of catastrophe if we fail to act, and -- finally!- denounced the tax-cut philosophy. Meanwhile, Larry Summers has finally made the point I've been pushing for a while -- that we're at major risk of falling into a deflationary trap.

I thought it might be useful to present a bit of evidence behind that concern. The figure above plots an estimate of the output gap -- the difference between actual and potential GDP, as a percentage of potential -- and the change in the inflation rate. Both series are taken from the IMF WEO database, for convenience, and use data from 1980-2007.

It's not a perfect fit -- this is economics, not physics, and anyway stuff besides the output gap bounces inflation around from year to year. But still, there's a clear correlation, driven largely but not entirely by the deep slump and disinflation of the early 1980s, and an implied slope of about 0.5 -- that is, every percentage point by which real GDP fall short of potential tends to reduce the inflation rate by about half a point over the course of the year.

And right now the CBO is saying that in the absence of a policy action the average output gap will average 6.8 percent over the next two years. Do the math: if anything like the historical relationship between output and inflation holds, we're looking at major deflation.

OK, maybe that relationship won't hold -- getting to actual deflation may take a deeper slump than merely reducing the inflation rate. And maybe a regression driven in part by 80s data isn't a good guide to current events. But deflation is a huge risk -- and getting out of a deflationary trap is very, very hard.

We truly are flirting with disaster.

Lately I've really fallen in love with writing utilities whose interface is simply HTTP. By making it accessible via HTTP, it's really easy to write clients that talk to the utility and, if the need arises, there are lots of tools that already exist for doing things with HTTP, like load balancing and caching, etc.

While it would be easy to use a framework to build these utilities, lately I've been choosing not to do so. Web frameworks like Django and Pylons are great when you need to build a fully-featured web application that will be accessible by people. When it will only be computers talking to the service, however, a lot of the machinery provided by frameworks is unneeded and will only slow your utility down. Instead of using a framework, we're going to write a pure WSGI application.

def application(environ, start_response):
    start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
    return ('Hello world!',)

from collections import defaultdict
counts = defaultdict(int)

def application(environ, start_response):
    global counts
    path = environ['PATH_INFO']
    method = environ['REQUEST_METHOD']
    if path.startswith('/song/'):
        song_id = path[6:]
        if method == 'GET':
            start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
            return (str(counts[song_id]),)
        elif method == 'POST':
            counts[song_id] += 1
            start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
            return (str(counts[song_id]),)
        else:
            start_response('405 METHOD NOT ALLOWED', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
            return ('Method Not Allowed',)
    start_response('404 NOT FOUND', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
    return ('Not Found',)

from collections import defaultdict
counts = defaultdict(int)

def application(environ, start_response):
    # ... start of app
    if path.startswith('/song/'):
        # ... song-specific logic
    elif path == '/':
        if method == 'GET':
            res = ','.join(['%s=%s' % (k, v) for k, v in counts.iteritems()])
            start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
            return (res,)
        elif method == 'DELETE':
            counts = defaultdict(int)
            start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
            return ('OK',)
        else:
            start_response('405 METHOD NOT ALLOWED', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
            return ('Method Not Allowed',)
    # ... rest of app

sudo easy_install Spawning

$ spawn -t 0 -p 8000 counter.application

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/song/1
0
$ curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/song/1
1
$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/song/1
1
$ curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/song/5
1
$ curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/song/5
2
$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/
1=1,5=2
$ curl -X DELETE http://127.0.0.1:8000/
OK

import httplib

class CountClient(object):
    def __init__(self, servers=['127.0.0.1:8000']):
        self.servers = servers

    def _get_server(self, song_id):
        return self.servers[song_id % len(self.servers)]

    def _song_request(self, song_id, method):
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(self._get_server(song_id))
        conn.request(method, '/song/%s' % (song_id,))
        resp = conn.getresponse()
        play_count = int(resp.read())
        conn.close()
        return play_count

    def get_play_count(self, song_id):
        return self._song_request(song_id, 'GET')

    def increment_play_count(self, song_id):
        return self._song_request(song_id, 'POST')

    def get_all_play_counts(self):
        dct = {}
        for server in self.servers:
            conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(server)
            conn.request('GET', '/')
            counts = conn.getresponse().read()
            conn.close()
            if not counts:
                continue
            dct.update(dict([map(int, pair.split('=')) for pair in counts.split(',')]))
        return dct

    def reset_all_play_counts(self):
        status = True
        for server in self.servers:
            conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(server)
            conn.request('DELETE', '/')
            resp = conn.getresponse().read()
            if resp != 'OK':
                status = False
            conn.close()
        return status

>>> from countclient import CountClient
>>> c = CountClient()
>>> c.get_play_count(1)
0
>>> c.increment_play_count(1)
1
>>> c.increment_play_count(1)
2
>>> c.get_play_count(1)
2
>>> c.increment_play_count(5)
1
>>> c.get_all_play_counts()
{1: 2, 5: 1}
>>> c.reset_all_play_counts()
True
>>> c.get_all_play_counts()
{}

e:Desktop ericflo$ ab -n 10000 http://127.0.0.1:8000/song/1
...
Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   7.792 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      1020000 bytes
HTML transferred:       10000 bytes
Requests per second:    1283.31 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       0.779 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.779 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          127.83 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.1      0       2
Processing:     0    1   0.8      1      43
Waiting:        0    1   0.5      0      43
Total:          1    1   0.8      1      43

Working with the light

Hugh Symonds

The Step Not Beyond
(Le Pas Au-Dela)
Maurice Blanchot
translated by Lycette Nelson

Time, time: the step not beyond that is not acomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this "outside of time in time" towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear. o From where does it come, this power of uprooting, of destruction or change, in the first words written facing the sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without prospect or pretense: "it--the sea"? (....)

o All words are adult. Only the space in which they reverberate--a space infinitely empty, like a garden where, even after the children have disappeared, their joyful cries continue to be heard--leads them back towards the perpetual death in which they seem to keep being born.

pdf download

America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon
Telegraph

With a $3 trillion war bill and an economy that flounders as China's soars, could America's era of dominance on the world stage be coming to an end? Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth travelled across America and China to observe how the future of these two great nations is intertwined, and to find out whether, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and the US election, we are on the brink of a new world order.

via J]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:04:30 -0700 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/715904 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/715903

Prince Siddhartha
Meditating under a Tree
Kagaku Murakami
(1888-1939)

July 03, 2008

permanent link

Franz Kafka
July 3, 1883 - June 3, 1924

The Kafka Project

Das Schloss
Franz Kafka at the Modern Word

.....................................................

We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to hell.
]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:04:30 -0700 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/715903 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/715902

Windowsill Daydreaming
Minor White
1958

Carp leaping
up a cascade
Katsushika Hokusai

July 09, 2008

permanent link

Minor White
July 9, 1908 - June 24, 1976

1 2 3 4 5

_______________________

Dreams with a memory- Minor White remembered Legacy: The Continuing Influence of Ansel Adams and Minor White [PDF]
Eric Biggerstaff

View Camera :: The Journal of Large-Format Photography

.....................................................

Vicinity of Georgetown, Colorado
1962

_______________________

Kritike
Volume Two Number One (June 2008)

Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality [PDF]
Mark W. Westmoreland

Come in. Welcome. Be my guest and I will be yours. Shall we ask, in accordance with the Derridean question, "Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?" What is the relationship between the interruption and the moment one enters the host's home? Derrida calls us toward a new understanding of hospitality--as an interruption. This paper will illuminate the history of hospitality in the West as well as trace Derrida's discussions of hospitality throughout many of works. The overall goal of this project is to provide readers of Derrida with a sort of reference guide for his discussions on and deconstructive approach to hospitality.

Throughout most of Derrida's work, there lurks an oasis of hospitality, sometimes on the verge of the horizon. At other times, it shines in the foreground. It is in these shining moments that we--both host and guest-- will venture in order to grasp the foundation of Derrida's thoughts on hospitality. Only then will we clearly see the horizon. This new understanding of hospitality requires a rethinking of the laws of common, conditional hospitality in contrast with the law, or perhaps we should say ethics, of unconditional hospitality.

via Continental Philosophy

_______________________

from
For the Fifty (Who Made PEACE with Their Bodies)
Philip Metres
Poetry Daily


1.
In the green beginning,
         in the morning mist,
                   they emerge from their chrysalis

of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
         slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
                   necks & tanks, Tommy's & Salvation

Army, platforms & clogs,
         abandoning bras & lingerie, labels
                   & names, courtesies & shames,

the emperor's rhetoric of defense,
         laying it down, their child-
                   stretched or still-taut flesh

giddy in sudden proximity,
         onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
                   as if come-hithering

or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
         the shape of a word yet to come, almost
                   embarrassing to name: a word

thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
         of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
                   they touch to make

the word they want to become:
         it's difficult to get the news
                   from our bodies, yet people die each day

for lack of what is found there:
         here: the fifty hold, & still
                   to become a testament, a will,

embody something outside
         themselves & themselves: the body,
                   the dreaming disarmed body.

...(more)

from
To See the Earth
Philip Metres
amazon

_______________________

Daily Pilgrims
Virgilio Ferreira

via Heading East

_______________________

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
9.2 - Summer 2008
via An und f]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:04:29 -0700 http://virb.com/jasonw22/posts/text/715902