John Debay

There are several pleasant little towns like Abbottabad in Pakistan, strung out along the roads that lead toward the mountains from Rawalpindi (the garrison town of Pakistani’s military brass and, until 2003, a safe-house for Khalid Sheik Muhammed). Muzaffarabad, Abbottabad … cool in summer and winter, with majestic views and discreet amenities. The colonial British—like Maj. James Abbott, who gave his name to this one—called them “hill stations,” designed for the rest and recreation of commissioned officers. The charming idea, like the location itself, survives among the Pakistani officer corps. If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

The Apple products & services that Apple does well are the ones that Steve Jobs uses (or cares about) and the ones he doesn’t use/care about are less good (or just plain bad). Jobs uses Keynote and it’s very good…but I’m pretty sure Jobs never has had to schedule his own appointments with iCal so that program is less good. Cloud apps and social apps are at the top of this list for a reason…I just don’t think Jobs cares about those things. I mean, he cares, but there’s not a lot of passion there…they aren’t a priority for him so he doesn’t really know how to think about them and attack those problems.

Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That’s the moment you realize you’re separated from so much. That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love.

If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.

A hereditary monarch, observed Thomas Paine, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

Interestingly enough, iPhone sales continue to far outpace the growth in the global smartphone market. In the December quarter, for example, while the global smartphone market grew at a pace of 70% year-over-year, Apple’s iPhone grew by 87%. This point right here should end all discussion. But apparently it doesn’t, as we find more and more of these articles every day.

Secondly, if anyone ought to worry about a platform becoming singularly dominant it should be Google. Apple has its iOS seeded in not only one, but three separate markets that it dominates – the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod Touch. Even more importantly, the next version of Apple’s Mac OS (Lion) is going to assume many key elements of the iOS operating system, which will likely result in higher conversion rates to the overall Apple ecosystem.

If we’re going to discuss platforms in isolation of unit sales it seems a little disingenuous to intentionally exclude sales of the iPad and iPod Touch. After all, platform market share is supposedly of the utmost importance because developers are purportedly going to rush straight to whichever platform is more ubiquitous. ComScore doesn’t include sales of either device when looking at the platform, which makes the overall data meaningless and unreliable.

Finally, here is why this issue of platform market share is trivial and financially irrelevant to the overall Apple investment thesis, and does nothing more than to distract people from financial reality. In the end, Apple makes so much of the money in the smartphone industry because it actually understands how to run a business.