The retail holiday season got off to a good start in the US according to all reports, with significant gains over last year and a particular focus on consumer electronics. One hot space is the tablet market, where Apple cut iPad prices and where Android devices continue to gain overall market share. A new group…
Business changes in networking are often more significant than technical changes even though networking is ostensibly a tech market area, and that’s the case this AM in my view. NSN has announced a major refocusing/restructuring that will cut about 17,000 jobs worldwide and concentrate company efforts on mobile broadband. Obviously this is a big deal…
HP reported its quarter, and while the company’s revenue-line beat of estimates buoyed its stock after hours, we think that the results were at least as troubling as they were gratifying for HP, or at least they should have been. Whitman’s decision not to spin out the PC business was a major risk factor for…
We’ve got an interesting juxtaposition of supply and demand issues in video, a reflection of the tension that’s inherent in the Internet or OTT or streaming video model, whatever you’d like to call it. Just what kind of video future the Web has will likely play out based on how these forces interact, and how…
Well, it’s official; HP is not going to spin out its PC operations. Some (most, on the Street) are hailing the move as a reversal of a crazy notion of the now-gone Leo Apotheker, but as I’ve noted in earlier blogs, I’m not so sure. I do believe that the tablet won’t sweep the PC…
The Street is busy handicapping the networking space, and what they’re finding is interesting in part because it demonstrates that stock potential and company sales and influence aren’t always congruent. Sometimes they are, though. One recent Street favorite is Cisco, whose sudden fall from financial grace shook both investors and company management. The result was…
Amazon’s quarter disappointed almost everyone, and the fact that there were so many different views about just what was disappointing makes it all the more challenging to analyze. Many said the profit picture was the problem; Amazon’s margins have been thin historically and the Street wanted proof that they’d fatten up. They didn’t get it. …
Netflix is still smarting from its abortive attempt to raise prices and change its business model by splitting its mail-DVD and streaming activities, or so says the Street pundits. I’m not totally convinced. Yes, I believe that these things did in fact increase customer dissatisfaction and churn, and yes that’s responsible for their larger-than-expected loss. …
Some’s up, some’s down, I guess. That seems to be true with regard to tech signals this morning, anyway. Oracle is buying a CRM cloud player, RightNow, and the Street is reporting issues with hardware sales, both in the service provider and enterprise spaces. The RightNow buy is interesting in a couple of dimensions. First,…
UBS reports that there are some unusual shifts in telecom spending, and I agree if one defines “unusual” as being “atypical to past performance” rather than “without clear cause”. What they’re seeing is a lower-than-usual ramp in capex in the fourth quarter, and a larger shift toward wireless investment. Duh! We have a lower ramp…