iPhones storm the market

When the first iPhones were released in July 2007, I was not a fan. However, I've had a change of heart since then because I see the iPhone in a different light now.

As a mere cell phone, an iPhone is extremely expensive, but if you see the iPhone for what it really is—a telecommunications mini-computer seamlessly synchronized with your desktop/laptop—then the iPhone is just about the best thing ever invented. Planning your trip? Get directions and check out traffic on the fly. Buying a book or DVD? Check out reviews online—or even buy it online—while you're still in the store. Listen to podcasts or music while you workout. Play a game while you're waiting in the dentist's office. Read the U.S. Constitution or Declaration of Independence. Tune your guitar. Take photos. Read wikis. Keep your grocery list. Check news from AP. Read email. Text. Oh, and it also works as a telephone.


Since the iPhone was introduced in July 2007, it's rocketed from 4% market share to 23% market share. Most of that seems to be from dissatisfied Palm users, which feels accurate: I used to own a Palm, but I've since moved all my address management to my iPhone. Although Blackberry's market share is pretty much holding steady, iPhones are slowly chipping that lead as well. Link.

My prediction: in 6 months, iPhones will overtake the Blackberry'market share and in a year, Blackberry's market share will dip below 30%.

Lala, lala, I can't hear you...

Too bad I didn't post my lecture I gave at The Conversation this weekend about license-based distribution, because the article below about Lala.com only reinforces it.

Lala.com is now offering licence-based ownership of music... a model that directly competes with the iTunes. In fact, if you own an Mp3 on iTunes, you can upload your library to Lala.com and stream it from their site if you log into Lala from any computer. That model blows iTunes out of the water where you own Mp3s locally and can't stream anything. Hell, even I'm tempted to use Lala.

This is probably related in some way to the new DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) that the big movie studios recently rolled out, but Lala.com distributes music, not movies. Apple's dominant iTunes model is severely in jeopardy if they don't act fast to sell all their MP3s without any DRM, and offer users the option to stream their music from anywhere. Unfortunately, Apple is only a content distributor and not a content producer like Sony, so Apple still needs permission from content producers to offer non-DRM Mp3s (Apple used to offer non-DRM Mp3s for $1.29, but caved in April 2007 when they realized consumers would rather purchase a CDs to snag those non-DRM Mp3s. Now Lala.com is offering non-DRM Mp3s, too.)... and the producers have realized they can cut the distributor out of the equation and sell straight to the consumer.

Lala.com Gives Digital Music Another Try
By RYAN NAKASHIMA
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008

(LOS ANGELES) — First a CD-trading site, then a free Web-based music browser, lala.com is being born again. The site is relaunching Tuesday as a hybrid, offering the digital download functionality of iTunes and the free music streaming of MySpace Music without the ads.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based private company, backed by $35 million in venture capital from Bain Capital LLC, Ignition Partners and Warner Music Group Corp., first launched in July 2006.

Its first version lacked scale and the second was met by numerous me-too players from MySpace and iMeem to Last.FM, said co-founder Bill Nguyen.

This time around, listening to any of the 6 million tracks at lala.com will be free. It will cost 10 cents to put a song in a Web locker for unending access on any computer where the user logs in.

Another 79 or 89 cents allows the user to download an MP3 track, with no digital rights management coding.

Because the site is ad-free, the business relies on selling Web tracks and MP3s.

"Where we get into trouble is if we do a lot of streaming and we don't sell music," Nguyen said.

Users of lala.com's test site — who number nearly 300,000 — are buying enough music to put the site on the path to profitability.

In the testing period, for every 1,000 free streams, the site sold about 60 Web songs and 60 MP3s. It needs to sell 15 to 20 of each per thousand free streams to be profitable, said spokesman John Kuch.

Users can upload their own music from CDs and iTunes into their digital locker for free. This gives lala.com enough knowledge of an individual's tastes to be able to market similar songs to him or her, a technique that boosts the sell-through rate about fivefold, Nguyen said.

The site has the participation of all four major record labels — Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI — and 170,000 independents.

Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business for Sony Music Entertainment Inc., said a key reason for licensing music to lala.com and other sites like it was the ability to sell music downloads.

"We do streaming deals that also have an upsell opportunity," Hesse said. "To us, that is an important side-by-side concept."

Sony's digital music sales represent more than a third of its U.S. revenue and are on pace to exceed revenue from physical CDs "fairly soon," Hesse said.

iTunes' Death Knell

In 1999, around the time Napster had the music industry up in arms for allowing anyone to "sample" an entire song for free—without anyone's permission—I had a heated discussion with my friend Dave. My argument was that Napster's service was, in essence, theft... meaning its users, then, were thieves. "A musician standing on a street corner is asking potential customers to sample their music, for free," I said (I later learned the term for this—'busking'), "but when users listen to music for free without the musician's permission, or the record label's permission, it's theft." Over the years, Dave's retort has never wavered—even if my argument were true, even if you call illicit music sampling theft, record sales have not diminished as a result and, to the contrary, users can now discover music in ways they've never been able to before. For instance, in the 1950s, you could go down to a record store and listen to a record for free to see if you liked it. What was so different about Napster?

Unfortunately, Napster was quite different. People weren't merely sampling—they were looting the entire store and not overtly leaving any tips. There was no established method to make money off of this radically new model. And like all new technologies that threaten the status quo, the Powers That Be freaked out. They acted fast and shut Napster down.

My discussion with Dave continued over the months and our banter eventually concluded with what I thought was the ideal business model to appease both disparate groups: customers wanted to freely sample music and not feel gouged by having to buy an entire album to get only a couple of songs; producers wanted to be paid for providing content. I remember sitting in Dave's computer room and saying, "Someone needs to create a system where anyone can listen to any song for just 30 seconds, for free, and buy only one song if they want—not necessarily the entire album—for only one dollar."

Later that year, Steve Jobs announced iTunes. Customers could listen to 30 seconds of any song and buy individual songs for only 99¢. iTunes has sold over 1 billions songs to date.

***

Whatever happens in the music industry eventually hits the movie industry. Music execs were worried about pirated MP3s until Apple found out how to make money with iTunes. As bandwidths increased, more data could be streamed and now movie executives faced the same problem the music industry faced in 1999—how do you make money when more people pirating your DVDs or streaming your content online?

I struggled with this question for a long time. I've always felt Napster enabled music piracy, but I could see Dave's point, too—sampling isn't inherently bad if it allows more customers to see your product. If it takes seven touches to a sale, you'd actually want to promote your product as much as you can and piracy is astonishingly efficient at that. Simply from "word of mouth", piracy adds more value to the product. Eventually, Steve Jobs also reached that conclusion, which is why Apple has positioned itself to dominate the market for distributing digital entertainment.

Here's what most people don't get: Apple isn't selling music or movies. It's selling convenience. When it becomes easier and safer and more legal to download music or movies from a legitimate source, 99¢ is a small price to pay to save yourself all the anguish of searching for and downloading a song and relabeling its tags, etc. For many years, there wasn't any alternative like iTunes, but people just wanted to listen to music. So when everyone suddenly broke into the store, there was no believable legal threat to make them stop. Apple offered up a much cleaner solution... and the market responded.

Unfortunately, the iTunes model is still imperfect. Let's say I want to buy a music album, but then my hard drive crashes. Unless I've backed up my data, I've now lost my music forever. Yet the technology exists to let me re-download my album (if I want to go to the trouble to prove I lost my data). And that's where we're at: property-based digital ownership. I can buy a DVD, but if it gets scratched, I'm hosed. I can download an entire season of 24, but if I delete episodes off my hard drive to save hard drive space, those episodes are gone forever. Perhaps the worst problem is all the proprietary restrictions: if I buy a song or movie for my iPod, I can't play that same song or movie on another MP3 player (what if my iPod doesn't work in my car so I want to burn my MP3s onto a CD for my car? Nyet.)

About four years ago, Dave introduced me to Steam. If you play any kind of games on a PC, you're bound to hear about Steam at some point. Steam is an online gaming platform which takes an innovative approach to software ownership. If you buy a game on the Steam platform, you don't own a physical copy, but a license of that game. This means you can download the game, play it, delete it, then download it again whenever you want. Forever. In fact, you can download the game from anyone else's computer and play it there. Because the software will only work when you sign in under your own account, the game is uniquely tied to you. Forever. Unsurprisingly, Valve, the creators of Steam, are branching out into offering music and movies through Steam.

It didn't take long for me to connect the dots: the way of the future is license-based ownership. In the future, we'll buy a license for music, movies, software... even books. Wherever we go, we'll be able to watch or listen to or read whatever we want whenever we want—we won't need to lug around DVDs or CDs or books. Even better, because computers will be everywhere, we'll just sign in with our unique username and password and access everything we own.

From that viewpoint, iTunes' model is still archaic. So imagine my surprise when Josh told me about movie studios joining together to create a new "rights locker" called DECE. Consider these forward-thinking features:

• Participating devices and services will be interoperable regardless of differing brands or corporate provenance. A TV episode, for instance, could be just as easily accessed on Microsoft's Zune as it would a Philips broadband-enabled TV set.
  
• DECE would allow an unlimited number of copies of a video to be created or burned onto a disc.
  
• The consumer would even have the option of not storing the copy at all, but rather streaming it from a server-based "rights locker" that can be tapped from any location.
  
• DECE would create open standards whereby any company that chose to create contents or services can do so to available specifications.

Apple is not yet included with DECE and that's a big problem for Apple. They're currently the dominant provider of digital content but the market will change if other providers allow better features than iTunes.

I suppose one could still argue piracy is theft. Technically speaking, of course, it is. Nevertheless, piracy has forced the market to (finally!) start offering content the way users have always wanted it—content bought in one format never has to be re-bought in another format. Consumers will get content how they want it and producers will have a way to get paid for it. With results like that, piracy may still be called theft, but is there anyone left who really cares anymore?

Full article follows:

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Hollywood is challenging the hegemony of Apple in digital distribution. A consortium of major studios -- excluding key Apple ally Walt Disney Co. -- is teaming up with leading retailers and consumer-electronics firms to essentially transform the paid download into an experience akin to buying a DVD. The goal is letting video purchased at any outlet be played on any device worldwide.

Known as the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the consortium brings together Warner Bros. Entertainment, Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Sony, Paramount Pictures and Comcast Corp. with retailer Best Buy along with tech giants Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Philips, Toshiba and Verisign. Each company has an invested an unspecified sum in the endeavor.

"When we start to bundle these digital rights together, we believe we can actually develop and deliver a product to the consumer that's better than free," said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer at Sony Pictures and the lead architect of DECE.

All together, they are mounting what may be the most radical redefinition yet of digital rights management. In its current form, DRM largely confines content to a limited number of devices depending on the source of that content. For instance, a song purchased on Apple's iTunes can be accessed on no more than five different computers and can't be legally played on a portable device beyond the iPod.

If DECE takes hold, it would institute several precedent-setting principles:

-- Participating devices and services will be interoperable regardless of differing brands or corporate provenance. A TV episode, for instance, could be just as easily accessed on Microsoft's Zune as it would a Philips broadband-enabled TV set.

-- DECE would allow an unlimited number of copies of a video to be created or burned onto a disc.

-- The consumer would even have the option of not storing the copy at all, but rather streaming it from a server-based "rights locker" that can be tapped from any location.

-- DECE would create open standards whereby any company that chose to create contents or services can do so to available specifications.

Freeing up digital content would also offer a marked distinction from the rights offered by market leader Apple under its Fairplay system. Apple's dominance of the digital marketplace also affords it considerable leverage in licensing negotiations over many of the studios involved in DECE.

"While we haven't yet had conversations with them about joining, we'd love to have them," said Singer, who added that DECE has reached out to Disney. "We're going in a slightly different direction than Apple by offering more choice in terms of storefront and device."

Other prominent companies not named to DECE: CBS Corp., Amazon, Walmart and leading telcos such as AT&T and Verizon. While not every company that hasn't joined has even been approached yet, those that have aren't necessarily opposed to DECE, according to Singer.

"If I had to characterize it, it's more of a wait-and-see mode than something they don't want to be involved in," he said.

But DECE is aimed just as much at providing an alternative to piracy as it is competing with Apple. Rampant illegal downloading has long been seen as an outgrowth of today's fragmented digital marketplace, which stymies consumers by requiring content providers to tailor their product for each distributor.

DECE represents yet another ambitious attempt by Hollywood to avoid the fate of the music industry, which has largely dropped DRM altogether. The consortium aims to give digital distribution a shot in the arm. For all the success of iTunes, XBox and Amazon, their collective sales haven't matched the growth curve experienced by DVD.

DECE plans to announce a brand name and logo, as well as a more detailed plan, at the upcoming Consumers Electronics Show in January. It also expects to name more companies to the consortium in the coming months.

Singer said he has began developing DECE inside Sony Pictures six years ago, constantly changing the formulation to meet the latest technologies. Outreach to other companies started in 2006. Link.

That's okay... Daddy was going to get an iPhone.

At every turn, parenthood is frought with peril... if this ever happens with my iPhone, I may have to look into adoption.

Iron Mac

I tell you, I'm a man obsessed.

Why I hated, but now love, the iPhone

I'm one of those people you might label a Mac Fanatic. I love my Mac OS and have been faithful to Apple for years, even when they were futzing with Mac clones.

Admittedly, I've used PCs in recent years and they've gotten much better, but... they're still not flashy like Macs are. Macs have an "X" factor which Mac people have difficulty explaining to PC people... Macs are just fun to use. They shimmer.

I know. Sounds hokey.


About the best way I can describe it is a quip I read in an Apple programming manual published in the late 80s, and I'm paraphrasing: "A Mac program must function well, but its design must function well, too. The user must enjoy looking at the program as much as they enjoy using the program." This simple design philosophy is the jewel of love sewn into every computing product made at Apple. The software, the hard case, the cables, the accessories... hell, even the packaging. Macs look cool.

Thus, when Apple ramped up their advertising for the iPhone, I was shocked to hear my lack of excitement. At $400, I thought, it was too pricey for a phone—I was happy with my simple $50 Razor.

And then...

A hard-core PC friend of mine started raving to me about the iPhone. (Around the same time, another hard-core PC programmer had opted to buy a Mac as his next comptuer... because it was better for progamming!) What, I thought, was the big deal about an iPhone? And why wasn't I raving to him about an iPhone?

Apple has been gradually exposing PC users to the Mac OS through the iPod and the iPhone, which I mentioned last January in my post, The Company in The White Suit. Just take a closer look at this chart (click to enlarge):



Flash forward to this last Superbowl Sunday. My friend passes me his iPhone. "Here, Dude. Check it out."

After 5 minutes, I was in love.

With constant internet access, you can get dynamic traffic news reports overlaid on a map—and the map is zoomable by using your fingers. You can surf the web and see actual pages. You can watch You Tube videos with two keystrokes. But best of all—you can view all your contacts' information on Apple's slick OS. This is a big selling point for me because if there's one thing that drives me batty about cell phones, it's their disposability. With my current phone, I always know that within a year or two, I'm going to probably upgrade to a newer phone... which will probably not be made by the same brand... which means I'll have to learn a new OS, and that's another learning curve I'm not likely to enjoy because the whole time I'll be dreading about having to learn the next phone's OS. Grrrrrrrr.

* I'm already familiar with Apple's OS.
* I can upload my contacts once and never have to worry about dealing with a SIM card ever again!
* I know the phone will sync seamlessly with my home system.

But come on, $400? For a phone?

It still sounds like a lot, but only if you're buying a phone. And this is not just any phone—it's a small telecommunications computer designed to sync to your main computer. I can live with spending $400 if it buys me the peace of mind that I'll never have to upgrade to another phone for at least 3 to 5 years.

As my friend Jena told me a few weeks ago, "My Blackberry broke and AT&T said they'd mail me a replacement within five to seven business days. I don't have five to seven business days! So I walked to the Apple store, and 5 minutes later I walked back out with an iPhone. 17 minutes after I got home, all my phone numbers and addresses were synched up and I was back up and running."

So I'm buying an iPhone this year, probably next month sometime. The next generation has broadband internet speed, but it's still in development and probably won't come out until September or early next year. And that's too. damned. long.

Ross <3 iPhones.

The Company in the White Suit

In The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guiness plays a scientist who invents a highly durable fabric that never gets dirty. You can imagine the cascading reactions to this incredible invention... first, "This is great! We'll only have to make one suit for everyone!" and then, "This is horrible! Everyone in the clothing business will be out of a job!" Guiness' character goes from hero to villain in a heartbeat.

This is the conundrum of our modern world: with each new technological invention, significant social and economic changes are sure to follow and how you react to these changes will place you in one of two camps: the Industrial Age camp, which favors stable and steady-paying jobs, or the Information Age camp, which favors innovation and efficiency. Eventually, the Industrial Age camp will become extinct and the transition to the Information Age will be extremely painful for everyone still holding an Industrial Age mindset... people always fight nail and tooth to protect their lifestyle because change and growth hurts.

The cultural and economic differences of these two camps are stark: Industrial Age countries like France, where the unions are all powerful, have static economies and higher unemployment. It's tougher to be fired there, so inefficient workers are able to stay with a company longer. Information Age countries like America have companies not loyal to particular employees and thus can fire workers whenever they have to. Information Age companies are more dynamic and can compete better because they save more money.

America isn't totally an Information Age country, but it's getting there. American title companies outsource their online title research to the Philippines because they can get 10 queries per dollar spent vs. 1 query per dollar using America workers. More money saved = more profitable business = more wealth = better economy = more information age jobs.

When desktop computers were introduced to help design British newspapers in the 80s, the British typesetters' union went on strike for weeks... but today all British newspapers are laid out with desktop computers. And now newspapers aren't really in the publishing business—they're in the news providing business. Focus too much on how many newspapers you're selling and you'll be out on the street in a couple of years. Focus instead on how to make money from the content on your news website and you'll keep pace with the winds of change.

The other day, a friend was saying that iPods weren't the best product on the market, that he listens to music on a competing product (which I won't mention because I'm a mean and venom-spewing reptile). Here was my response:

While Apple may not have the best product, they're like McDonald's in they they don't make the best hamburgers, but they have the best system to deliver it. Well, maybe not the best, but Apple has managed to convert, and retain, people like me into cultists.

It's no secret Steve Jobs was at the center of that innovation. And when he left Apple, everything went corporate again. It lost its flair. But when Jobs came back in from the cold, he did it again: Jobs envisioned Apple as being at the center of the digital lifestyle. iPods are only one piece of his grand plan; if you snap digital photos, create graphic novels, listen to or create digital music or movies... you name it—if it's digital, Apple now has sleekly designed software and hardware to do it. Best of all, the software and hardware all talk to each other seamlessly. That's the power of the Apple brand—interoperability. Apple's cool parts make one head-shakingly cool whole.

The iPod was only Apple's first strategic lure for PC users into Apple-ness. It worked like butter, and the iPod's various incarnations have consistently tricked more PC users into using a minimalist version of Apple's snazzy OS X. This led to more and more buzz... by the time Apple's iPhone came out this month, my PC user friends were practically salivating over it. Even I, the perennial Mac user, didn't care that much for it... but they're going crazy! I knew Apple had been planning this for many years, but it's the first time I'd seen tangible results of their branding campaign. You can get a glimpse of Apple's marketing strategy by looking at this:

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)


Actor Brian Dennehy was explaining in an interview that he wasn't more famous because he "hadn't created a need for Brian Dennehy". You can be the best actor or writer or businessman in the world, but if nobody knows about you and nobody knows why they need your product over the competition's product, you might as well hang up the spurs. As you illustrated with Apple, you need not even have the best product, either—the loudest person shouting always gets the most attention.

A musician on the street plays his guitar—if you like it, you give him money, but you're not obligated to. This is called busking and the rules of Darwinism dictate that if the musician doesn't get enough money dropped in his hat, he eventually starves and chooses a different job. At least with his hat out there, he still has a chance of making enough money to keep making music. Napster elevated busking into a highly efficient system of thievery by letting anyone hear the best musicians in the world while also throwing away the artists' hats. So if everything that musicians and movie producers produce can be copied onto a CD or DVD for free, how (and why) would they ever make more content? There's no incentive.

Then along came iTunes. Want to see the entire first season of 24 for only $35? Why not? It's easier and faster than downloading them all off eDonkey or Limewire. Want to listen to a particular recording of Gilbert & Sullivan's "A British Tar"? Download it for only 99¢. Apple had finally found a healthy business model to generate revenue from distributing digital entertainment. It was secure. It worked. The catch? You have to watch all your downloaded movies with iTunes and listen to all the music either on iTunes or with your iPod. Apple created the business model—so they set the rules. You don't like the rules? Don't use their system.

Apple's overt strategy has been to switch PC users to the Mac platform so more consumers buy Mac computers and the iPod was thought to be the best bait to accomplish that goal. Thus, Apple mandated that no iTunes purchases can be played on anything other than Apple's hardware. That's kind of harsh if you prefer other hardware, but it's all part of Apple's plan to get people hooked on Macs. France has already passed a law to break that stranglehold and today a growing number of European countries are joining that fight:

European drive against iTunes builds support
10:44 a.m. EST, January 23, 2007

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- German and French consumer groups have joined a Nordic-led drive to force Apple Inc. to make its iTunes online store compatible with digital music players made by rival companies, a Norwegian official said Monday.

Currently, songs purchased and downloaded through iTunes are designed to work with Apple's market-leading iPod players but not competitors' models, including those using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media system. Likewise, iPods generally can't play copy-protected music sold through non-Apple stores.

Last June, consumer agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden claimed that Apple was violating contract and copyright laws in their countries.

Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said French consumer lobby UFC-Que Choisir and its German counterpart, Ferbraucherzentralen, joined the effort late last year, and other European countries are considering it. Finland's Kuluttajavirasto consumer group is also part of the effort.

"This is important because Germany and France are European giants," Thon said. "Germany, in particular, is a big market for digital music."

The Nordic regulators have met Apple officials at least twice on the complaints.

"Apple is aware of the concerns we've heard from several agencies in Europe and we're looking forward to resolving these issues as quickly as possible," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Monday.

"Apple hopes that European governments will encourage a competitive environment that lets innovation thrive, protects intellectual property and allows consumers to decide which products are successful."

Thon said Norway gave Apple until September to change its polices, or face possible legal action and fines in the country.

"It cannot be good for the music industry for them to lock music into one system," he said.

A French law that allows regulators to force Apple to make its iPod player and iTunes store compatible with rival offerings went into effect in August.

Apple has been working to expand its iPod sales in Europe and said during its quarterly report last week its advertising and sales efforts were paying off.

Company officials say the iPod gained market share in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Denmark during the holiday period.

Governments, not shareholders, are telling businesses what to do??? Apple has created a business model that works—and now Europeans want to change it. Instead of voting with their wallet by giving their money to one of Apple's competitors, they've chosen to walk into a Rolls Royce car lot and scream until they get a hybrid. Has anyone ever wondered why there are no other significant competitors in the digital entertainment distribution market? Nobody else has found a profitable business model! It's not like all potential competitors are being discouraged from creating products that distribute digital entertainment—it's just that Apple is the only company that's created a viable format for producers and consumers.

What makes this story even more interesting is that Apple makes its bread and butter from selling hardware, which is an Industrial Age commodity... whereas iTunes is a multi-platform software that sells content—an Information Age commodity. Apple is obviously migrating its revenue stream from one camp to the other, but until that migration is complete, Apple still needs those iPod sales, which means keeping a lock (for now) on their proprietary iTunes format for as long as they can.

Who will adapt to whom—Apple or Europe? Either way, it's going to hurt. Change always does.

Apple is "the new Sony"

The Disney-Pixar deal makes for some eyebrow-raising cross-pollination. Read what Andrew Neff at Bear Stearns had to say:

Apple is 'the new Sony' - Bear Sterns
By Jonny Evans

Apple has huge growth opportunities and appears likely to emerge as the "nexus of the digital lifestyle evolution", an analyst explained this morning.

Apple is rapidly transforming into the firm Sony always wanted to be, said Bear Sterns analyst Andrew Neff.

"In a sense, Apple is becoming what Sony always wanted to be: a visionary that seamlessly integrates the best-of-breed hardware with content to fundamentally alter the way we live - and iPod is just the beginning, like Walkman before it," he wrote, according to Forbes.

Neff warns investors not to underestimate Apple, a company that creates products that are renowned for their ability to create disruptive change, he warns.

Apple's move into video, for example, has changed the way video is created (Final Cut Pro, iMovie) and how it is consumed (iTunes Music Store and iPod video).

Looking ahead, Neff predicts Apple will make further moves into consumer electronics, suggesting it may even reveal an HDTV device with iPod features built in, a new mobile phone, or even an iPod camera may emerge.

Neff's comments appear as his colleague, Robert Peck, warns that search giant Google may have plans to launch an iTunes-competing service of its own.

Bear Strerns rates Apple as an "outperforming" stock with a $103 target price.

And then, there's the word on the street. Roberto's Myspace bulletin about this cracks me up:

Disney=Pixar=Apple Computers=Pixar=Disney?!

Steve "owns" Apple.

Steve "owns" Pixar.

Disney owns Pixar, now.

Disney owns Pixar owned by Steve who owns Apple Computers, Inc.

On top of that Steve is Board Member at Disney, Pixar CEO, and Apple CEO.

John Lasseter, the UTTER AND IMMACULATE GENIUS Creative Director (AKA Genius) at Pixar is now Creative Head Cheese at Both Pixar and Disney overseeing both creative projects AND theme parks?!

And Disney will work EXCLUSIVELY with Steve's Apple Computers with Digiital Software AND Video Media, not to mention content for the Viddy iPod AND the fact that Disney has TV stations galore with cool stuff?

Yes! This shall be known as Disney Year 1 EAE (Era After Eisner).

(Eisner SUCKED! He was a horrible horrible man who hated children and puppies and sucked the blood out of Disney and ousted Roy Disney! HE OUSTED ROY DISNEY! WHAT A SICK F**K!!!)

THIS is going to be interesting. :-D