The Palm Pre may have been the most successful handset rollout in Sprint’s history, but it hasn’t stopped the carrier from hemorrhaging customers in the months following its launch.
AT&T reports third-quarter earnings Thursday and by all accounts, they should be strong enough, thanks to the sheer size of the company’s footprint and, of course, its exclusive carrier rights to the iPhone.
Add Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty to the list of analysts calling for Apple to broaden the iPhone’s distribution by ending carrier exclusivity deals. In a research note issued this morning, Huberty–noting that the iPhone’s market share grew 136 percent in France when Apple switched to multicarrier agreements there–said iPhone sales could more than double if the company took a similar tack in other countries.
“It’s clear that the quality of iPhone games is eclipsing its console counterparts, and that’s even more acute when you compare it against the prior generation.” That’s what ngmoco co-founder and Electronic Arts alum Neil Young said of Apple’s iconic handset at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, and it’s worth reflecting on a bit in light of a new report from Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi that claims the iPhone OS will soon create pricing and customer migration pressure for traditional gaming platforms.
Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun will undoubtedly be the subject of much discussion this afternoon when the database behemoth reports fiscal first-quarter earnings after the market close. Indeed, there’s quite a bit of jawing about it already, particularly about Oracle’s continued commitment to the deal in light of the ugly decline in Sun’s revenues and profitability since it was announced in April.
AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple is set to expire as early as next year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be renewed–despite complaints about the carrier’s network. That’s the word from iSuppli, which predicts Apple will extend its agreement with AT&T because it has no reason not to.
With the iPhone, Apple is doing to the handset industry what it has done to the PC industry with the Mac: Claiming an inordinate share of profits relative to revenue. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates that Apple, though it is only the fifth-largest handset vendor, claimed nearly a third of handset industry profits in the first half of 2009.
Wall Street is finally having its say about the newly announced Microsoft-Yahoo deal, and while opinions are mixed, there is some consensus on who got the better end of the deal: Microsoft. Seems the Street would have much preferred the “boatloads of money” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz once said she’d demand for a search deal than the “boatloads of value” she claims to have given them this morning. After the jump, a roundup of analysts’ notes issued about the deal.
Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi has a few ideas about what Dell should do with the nearly $11 billion in cash reserves it’s sitting on and they don’t include buying Palm. Sacconaghi believes that Dell isn’t interested in a “transformational” acquisition, though its interest in the handset market might suggest otherwise. Rather, the company is mulling the acquisition of small- to medium-sized enterprise-related companies.
With AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity deal set to expire in mid-2010, Apple has a big decision to make: Extend that deal or abandon it and sign on Verizon as a second carrier partner. In a note to clients today, Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi considers the implications of both choices and concludes that the latter is the best option for Apple.
Why? A deal with Verizon could more than double U.S. iPhone sales in the near term.
With Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide product marketing, delivering the Macworld keynote today, analyst expectations for big product announcements are running very, very low.
Though Wal-Mart has made no official announcement regarding the reportedly imminent arrival of Apple’s iPhone on its shelves, it would seem that the big-box retailer will begin peddling the device before the year is out. If that’s the case, how many iPhones is Wal-Mart capable of selling?
Like great civilizations, great companies are not conquered from without until they have destroyed themselves from within. And Yahoo appears to be well on its way to doing just that. Shares in the company slid still deeper into the mud today as the market reflected on the uneventful conclusion of the company’s merger talks with Microsoft and its decision to–well, let’s face it–become a reseller of Google ads.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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