Written May 2011 By Cliff Feldwick
Financial planners moan about new regulations. Bankers aren’t happy with new disclosure requirements and restrictions on fees - although a recent Bank of America mailing informed me that if I ever missed one payment, my interest rate would go to 29.99% forever. Remember when we thought 15% was usury? And when, legally, it was? Ah, yes, the good old days. Anyway, no matter what your business, remember this – it could be worse; you could be in computers.
Talk about a bad investment
What if you bought an up-and-coming company to expand your product line? Paid $590 million for it? In 2009? Think this should be producing a few bucks by now? That would be wrong, if you were Cisco and the product was the Flip video camera. What Cisco, the 800 pound gorilla of big networking equipment, was doing fooling in the inexpensive home video line was a good question. Maybe trying to capture a decent market like they did when they bought out Linksys and their used-by-people-as-well-as-companies line of routers. But at least that was close to their core business expertise. Flips? Apparently not. As you can gather, Cisco has decided to abandon the Flip line. No plans, apparently, to sell it off either. Just write it off. Wow.
There are certainly alternatives to the Flip out there. Kodak has a video camera called a Playsport that is waterproof and drop proof. A lot of digital cameras, like the Canon Powershot line, can do videos as well as still pictures. And there are the smart phones, especially the iPhone 4, with built-in video.
And there’s the killer – smartphones. Cisco has seen the writing on the wall, and it was posted there on Google from an iPhone or a BlackBerry. The new generation of phones easily takes and posts videos directly. No need to hook up to a computer, download and then email or post. Take it, send it, done. For 90% of what people want to do – cute shots of their kids, embarrassing flubs by politicians – the quality is just fine and the immediacy is a selling point.
Sales down
And then there are the slowing sales of computers themselves. First quarter sales figures show that consumer demand for new PC’s is down from last year. Businesses are buying, since they usually replace on a regular schedule, but people are holding off, so the overall trend is down.
One thing that could be contributing to this is what has been called “tablet cannibalization”. The iPad has sold 15 million units in one year, with demand still high. Apple says they sell every one they can make. Wouldn’t you like to have that problem? Going on line recently to check pricing, I saw a lot of “sold out” postings, even for the highest end 64GB model at $829.
And, let’s face it, $829 is not cheap. You can buy a very nice laptop for that, if you wait for sales. The laptop will have a bigger screen and lots more capability, but it won’t be as fun or as cool. There are other iPad competitors out there as well, each taking up a slice of what probably went for full-scale computers in past years. And when you’ve spent even $499 for the cheapest iPad model, you’re probably thinking that’s all the technology you can justify for a while.
I haven’t seen computer manufacturers fighting back by lowering prices. Instead, many are planning on introducing tablets, hoping to take a small slice of the much more lucrative Apple market. Interesting, since every one of PC Magazine’s list of “Best iPad Business Apps” had a “yes, but” attached – a drawback, such as “only works with Macs” or “not as full-featured as the PC product”, that normally would cause people to shun them somewhat. So maybe business applications aren’t the moving force here.
Meanwhile, Apple’s stock is up since they reported a 95% jump in quarterly earnings.
So I take it back. Maybe it’s not bad to be in computers – as long as you’re Apple.
Browser wars – continued
Microsoft is planning on rolling out Internet Explorer 9 as an update that gets automatically downloaded to computers running
A better alternative would be to try Google’s Chrome browser. I’ve been using it for several months and it is certainly quicker, especially for downloads.
Another option to IE is Firefox, long a favorite of mine because of the available Adblock Plus add-in that blocks pop-up and sideboard ads extremely well. You don’t realize how annoying (and scam-like) all the ads on the side of Facebook are until they’re gone. Happily, a beta version of Adblock for Chrome is now available. I’ve loaded that and will let you know how it works out.
Cliff Feldwick is president of Riverside Computer, and does PC troubleshooting and network setups for small businesses. He still does not own an iPad. He can be reached at 410-880-0171 or at cliff@feldwick.com.