Well it’s been a busy week. Last week we had Apple’s WWDC keynote. Tim Cook kicked ass, and I’m really impressed with how Apple keeps raising the bar. Not so much on the iPhone this time, but on the MacOS with Mountain Lion, and the new geekgasm-producing 15″ Macbook Pro with Retina Display. I gotta get me one of those. Except I was really planning on the 27″ iMac instead. But now the 15″ MBP has higher resolution than the grand daddy of all iMacs. So what’s a guy to do?
I’ll wait a bit. I can’t imagine Apple NOT having at least the same resolution on its iMacs going forward. I really want the extra real estate on my screen. And I don’t just mean pixels. I mean inches. I don’t have 20/20 vision, and honestly I don’t care about DPI as much as I care about the overall size of my display.
As an Apple shareholder I love what I see from the company. Click here to read what I wrote at iMore. The short version is I’m loving how Apple is leveraging its 385 million iOS users and making the Mac platform so much more compelling by gluing everything together using iCloud. Smart.
I bought Apple stock for something like $166 back when the first iPhone launched. I think I’ve said this before, but it was the 2nd time I purchased Apple stock. The first time, during the iPod revolution, I took my profits. That was dumb. It reinforced my belief in how investing should work. That is, buy something because you believe in its future and growth. Sell it when your reason for buying is no longer true.
This week RIM and Celestica decided to part ways. I wrote a summary of my view over on CrackBerry, and you can click here to read it. I find it hilariously crazy that so many journalists are writing about this as if Celestica pulled the plug on RIM. Yeah, right. RIM was 19% of Celestica’s revenue. They were not 19% of profit, but they were a positive contributor to Celestica’s bottom line and it’s highly doubtful that Celestica fired its customer. No way. I think RIM is re-evaluating its supply chain and doesn’t need 4 or 5 contract manufacturers.
Last night Microsoft announced its “surface” tablet. Oh, wait … didn’t they have a “surface” touch screen coffee table type of product that never went to market? And they recycled the name. Bad idea. When a product flops, there is a negative anchor now attached to the name. Don’t launch the next product with one foot in the grave already … come on. This is psychology 101 here …
I have yet to do any reading / video watching on the new MSFT product. If you have thoughts I’d love to hear them in the comments section.
Later this week I’m attending BlackBerry Jam in Toronto. No, I don’t expect RIM to give me a dev alpha device. I’m not a dev. Well, I guess I am registered as a developer but I’ve never published an app, so it doesn’t really count. I’ll be really interested to see what the mood is like. I’ve noticed a change in media sentiment lately. It seems like not everything being written about RIM is doom and gloom anymore. Lots of people are coming away from the BB Jam sessions and blogging about their positive experiences. I find that encouraging. But still … we’re waiting for a launch.
On a personal note, I’m really enjoying the start to the summer we’ve had so far. I have started to naturally awaken around 6am (no alarm), and I’m getting up and knocking an item off my to do list before going for a 6:45 run / workout. I’m back at the house before 7:30 when the kids tend to wake up. It feels really nice to be already “into gear” at that hour, and enjoy breakfast with my family. I absolutely LOVE working from home.
17 months ago I left the corporate life behind. It has been 3 years (at least?) in the planning. 12 months ago I took my family to Marseillan, France for a 10 week mini-retirement. We had the times of our lives. I’m sure that some of you reading this are thinking you’d like to do the same. Just go for it. If you’re not happy with whatever office you arrive at in the morning, do something else.
Hi, I'm Chris Umiastowski. I'm a 10-year veteran of sell side equity research and this is where I come to connect with friends on all things related to tech investing.
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I agree with you totally on Celestica not firing RIM. Celestica needs the RIM revenue (now dwindling of course), but RIM didn’t need Celestica any more for the reason you describe.
As for the Microsoft’s Surface tablet, I don’t think it’s so bad attaching a previously used name to this new product as people might remember the screen coffee table product but many fewer (me included) remember what it was called, especially not the general public. You attach a connotation to it that the general public wouldn’t since you are in the industry (and I’m in the industry and don’t remember the name). So I think they are good to go with that name. It should do modestly well (certainly better than the Playbook), but they don’t really have the ecosystem that Apple does for it to be a resounding success, not to mention Microsoft usually comes out with half-baked products and then uses their marketing muscle and other tactics to attempt to make them a success. But, with the rise of the web and mobile devices Microsoft has found their dominance in controlling the PC operating system less and less useful in bulldozing the competition in this manner.
I too have made the same mistakes you have investing, ie making a great stock pick, enjoying a huge surge in price, then selling to take profits, sometimes because I wanted to crystallize the profits and sometimes because there might have been a temporary hiccup in the company’s progress while I believed that the overall prospects for the company (past this hiccup) was still good. In the latter case I felt that I was smart enough to then buy the stock at a lower price and then surf the next wave up, a strategy I see Bay St money managers attempting to successfully execute (but rarely being able to do so), the majority of which seem to have upwards of 50% annual turnover rates in their portfolios. When I worked on Bay St as a portfolio manager all I was asked all the time was “what are you buying, what are you selling, what do you like?”. If you look at a stock chart of any successful company with a general upward trend over a few years, are any of us really smart enough to capitalize on all those uptick squiggles in the chart by repeatedly selling the stock at a high and then buying it back at a lower level? No. Not me anyway as I have never been smart enough to predict (in the short term anyway) the state of a system with seemingly infinite degrees of freedom. And even if I, or anyone was, all that does is result in divvying out a percentage to the tax man every year, paying transaction fees and then possibly missing the next upsurge by not being able to guess when to buy. So, for me, I now resist the urage to be greedy and take profits and it’s mostly buy and hold unless thing change drastically with the company enough for me to no longer have faith in its long term prospects. I have found I am pretty good at picking stocks (which for me is having one good idea maybe once a year) but lousy at trying to predict what a future stock chart will look like (and who is?). So now I try to be a bit more like Warren Buffett.
As for your leaving the corporate world, I respect and applaud what you have done, especially with a family and a young child. However, I wonder: Where is your income coming from? (none of my business of course!)