Saw This One Coming

Apple's Jobs Cuts IPhone Price by $200

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

I was having a conversation with somebody else who works in the "phone biz" the other day and this topic came up.  We were interested in seeing the overall first quarter sales figures for the iPhone, especially the August numbers.  We were harbouring a suspicion, based on the lack of crowing coming from the Apple camp that they'd seen a pretty dramatic slip off once past early July.

I have seen some contradictory reports but they were unverified and this move to effectively slash prices just 2 months after launch is pretty blatent, it also sets the stage for the next thing we're interested in which is the public bust up between AT&T and Apple when Apple finally gets around to announcing the terms they've reached with any of the European Operators.

The problem with the iPhone launch was its spectacular success.  This isn't always a good thing as sales at that level and price would always be hard to maintain, especially when you're also locking people into an expensive phone contract.  If this had been a $50 or $100 reduction, I and I suspect the markets, would have thought it a sound move to keep momentum.  $200 sounds a little bit too much like an effort to force growth in market share at the expense of margin.  They should ask Motorola about how that one works out in the phone business.

What is still unclear is just what impact this move has on profitability.  I've not seen a real BOM analysis, and no phone BOM is complete without amortising your software and other development costs - but if they can still make money on $400 a device I'll be impressed.  High end phones typically run at a BOM of $200 and up before you start factoring in your development costs.  That's for a normal device, the iPhone is anything but normal.

Watch these spaces...

Blogged with Flock

Return of the Blue Screen of Death aka Who's Fault is it Anyway?

After 3 completely pain free years of running a XP Pro box, I had a sudden attacks of the Blue Screen of Death.  It was pretty scary and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what could have happened... except, I had recently installed a new updated Logitech webcam.  I found that as long as I unplugged the cam, and stopped the cam software as soon as possible after launch, then the machine was happy and settled.

This lead me to suspect that all was not well in the world of Logitech.

A little bit of Googling revealed that I was correct in my assumptions.  There appears to be a pretty massive problem with Logitech's XP and Vista drivers which now dates back to 2006.  Logitech support see this differently.  They believe that their stuff works fine on XP (which it does sort of) but the real villans are Skype and Windows Live Messenger which apparently are incompatable with their software and therefore it is their problem. WTF?

I mean, get serious guys.  The bleedin' box has a "compatable with Skype" sticker on it.  That would suggest your drivers and software actually do work with the application without fragging my machine.

A lot of experimentation, and BSODs later, and I find the following:
 - You have to disable every single application including Spyware and Virus protection when you install the drivers
 - You have to install the drivers with the camera disconnected or the installation corrupts
 - You have to install the complete package AND then uninstall the application suite which accompanies the drivers but installs anyway
 - You have to disable the built in USB Microphone in the webcam

Do that, and it seems to work fine.

I think Logitech seriously need to take a look at their software development standards.