AllThingsD » Andy Kessler

How Much Is Apple Worth?

Andy Kessler — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:03:10 +0000

Apple is a juggernaut. Its stock touched $600 on Thursday, which represents $560 billion in market capitalization. Compare this to Exxon Mobil, with a market cap of $400 billion, IBM’s $240 billion and Wal-Mart’s $210 billion. Can Apple really be worth that much?

The easy answer is that the company is worth whatever the market says it’s worth. Well, yes, the market is right every day — but it is right only for that day. What about tomorrow?

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When Will Social Media Elect a President?

Andy Kessler — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:08:46 +0000

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 took place over seven venues, with 10,000-20,000 attendees and no microphones. One candidate would speak for an hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal and then a half-hour response from the original speaker (which alternated debate to debate).

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How Videogames Are Changing the Economy

Andy Kessler — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:53:55 +0000

This fall, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology announced that it had created the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, which clocks in at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second. This is the shape of the world to come—but not in the way you might think.

Powering the Tianhe-1A are some three million processing cores from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley company that has sold hundreds of millions of graphics chips for videogames. That’s right—every time someone fires up a videogame like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, the state of the art in technology advances. Hug a geek today.

What a switch. For centuries, the military has driven technology forward, fostering new waves of industrialization and corporate use. James Watt’s steam engine was perfected with the help of a cannon-boring tool. Computers were created during World War II to calculate artillery firing and to break codes. The military bought half of all semiconductors until the late 1960s. Even the first global-positioning systems (GPS) were funded by Congress, not for navigation but as a nuclear detonation detection system. Add microwave ovens from radar, Blu-ray discs from lasers, or Velcro and Tang from NASA, and there’s no doubt how much government acquisition programs have shaped our lives.

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The iPhone, Net Neutrality and the FCC

Andy Kessler — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:25:48 +0000

AT&T’s (T) Picturephone, shown at the 1964 World’s Fair, was a huge flop. Apple’s (AAPL) new iPhone 4, announced this week, has a front-facing camera for video chats. It might succeed, except that AT&T isn’t providing enough bandwidth capacity.

First, the company won’t allow two-way video to work over its data network. Second, AT&T just made bandwidth-intensive video expensive by dropping iPhone and iPad’s $30 per month unlimited data plans and replacing them with a two-tiered plan of $15 a month for under 200 megabyte usage or $25 for two gigs. Not that I have a problem with AT&T charging me or the two percent of its customers who are heavy data users. I can always sign up with a competitor. Oh, wait. There are none. AT&T has an exclusive contract with Apple.

AT&T can easily build out enough capacity to handle heavy data users. But it may be playing a game of chess with the FCC over its attempt to impose “network neutrality” rules. The FCC (plus Google and friends) wants all users to have free rein to do what they want on the Internet and smart phones. AT&T just wants users to pay for excess bandwidth.

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Why AT&T Killed Google Voice

Andy Kessler — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:04:55 +0000

Earlier this month, Apple (AAPL) rejected an application for the iPhone called Google Voice. The uproar set off a chain of events—Google’s (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigating wireless open access and handset exclusivity—that may finally end the 135-year-old Alexander Graham Bell era. It’s about time.

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

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