Liberty

Thank you for the compilation, much appreciated!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/technology/after-alibaba-ipo-us-web-giants-may-stop-ignoring-chinese-rivals.html

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/cox-plans-gigabit-internet-for-residential-customers-this-year/ "Cox Communications President Pat Esser said the cable company will roll out gigabit broadband to residential customers this year."

I apologize about that, I've been kind of using this thread as the general Elon Musk repository since I know that nobody is really discussing buying Tesla anymore and the shorts aren't very verbose either. Maybe I should create another thread for that on the general board, though.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/01/us-spacex-unitedlaunchalliance-idUSKBN0DH2G420140501

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=72395&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1924795&highlight=

Thank you very much, 50centdollars, that was very helpful.

It's on my 2nd level watchlist. I'm certainly interested in learning more about it, as I really like that model. One worry is that the CEO might not be at his peak performance (wasn't he on medical leave for a long time after a brain injury?). It's a bit delicate... I'm not sure how to find out more about that. Has this been covered anywhere?

At this rate Glenn might soon be able to do a round trip :P

I think Dediu is more interested in the technology than the financials (he's more a tech analyst than a financial analyst, though he looks at that too), so his analysis centers on how the technology is being adopted. Penetration is more interesting than sales to him. I think a big difference that must be taken into account is the replacement cycle, which has a huge impact on sales. If the average person keeps an iPhone 2 years and an iPad 5 years, over 10 years you'll sell 5 phones an 2 tablets to that person. That's quite a big difference for products that are priced similarly. So if the phone and tablet had been launched on exactly the same day of the same year, over time you could have sales of one going much stronger than the other despite having exactly the same penetration curve (that's the theory). Now, I'm not someone who makes detailed models of sales years in advance and all that (I'd rather be approximately right than precisely wrong - though I'v also been approximately wrong many times, so ymmv), but I do know that I'm not judging things by a flat quarter.

Thanks for posting.

Not only that, but over the past 15 years, there's been a very strong effect when people buy their first Apple product (whether a Mac, an iPod, an iPhone); it significantly increases the chances that they'll buy other Apple products. I think it's partly because all the products share a design philosophy, quality level, aesthetic sense, etc, but also because they all inter-operate very well. A little while ago, people used to get an iPod and then when they needed a new computer, they got a Mac because they liked the iPod so much. How many Macs were sold because of iPods? I don't know, but I think it's a significant number. That halo effect is now happening with the iPhone. People who aren't in the Apple ecosystem get iPhones, and then they look at iPads and Macs and Apple TVs (and soon wearables?). It doesn't all happen immediately, but over time there seems to be a strong pull... So they don't only get the ecosystem lock-in from the phone, but from a bunch of devices that are collectively more useful because they augment each other (that's what CarPlay primarily is - a way to make an iPhone more useful, not a way to drive iTunes Radio revenue or whatever). I don't think that Samsung gets much of that effect... Another way to think about it is that if each product line of Apple was spun off into a different company, their sum would be worth less than having all of them inside Apple, because each lines helps sell the other lines' products, and they make each other better by being in an ecosystem (thus valuable to customers, so they're ready to pay more). I think that's part of the reason why entering new categories is so interesting. No only because of the money made by the new gizmos themselves, but as a way to further strengthen the whole edifice and make other Apple products more sticky and desirable.

I wonder if this is a subtle dig at Sokol, erasing the brand most associated with him... Good move from a branding perspective, in any case. If I lived in an area served by the company, I'd love to get my power from Berkshire Energy :)

Thanks Dazel! It's why I ask, I know you can't say no! But I also know you enjoy it, so I don't feel bad ;)

Dazel and SD (and others), do you know why Sherritt sold PMRL at 9x? Were they in a cash crunch or otherwise forced sellers? I've been meaning to dig more into Sherritt for a long time but never actually got around to it (shame on me). I'm very happy with the assets, but I never could fully figure out why they got the price they did (though I know it required a lot of patience and the mining sector in Canada has been in the dumps for a while, so I'm sure this has to do with those types of pressures on Sherritt). I could more easily understand if they paid a higher multiple at the bottom of a commodity cycle and thus got a good price in absolute dollars when you look at the whole cycle, with expansions at some of the mines providing future growth plus lots of exploration potential at CDP. But paying 9x and then turning around and having the market value it at much higher multiples inside Altius is a bit hard to understand for me (though it wouldn't be the first major market inefficiency we witnessed...). I appreciate your insights. Thanks.

Thanks!

Speaking of Dediu: http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/30/the-ipad-discontinuity/

ValueAct's Jeff Ubben talking about VRX (and MSFT): http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/04/29/milken-tremendous-upside-in-microsoft-ub?&videoId=312773082 (gotta love their interview location, with random people walking like 6 inches from the interviewee)

The blogs are defunct. Anyone saved a copy? Might be able to find it on Archive.org. F.ex, here's a snapshot from 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20101202022255/http://robertpiomolloy.com/blog/

How did you like it? It certainly made me appreciate how much work Ackman puts into his ideas...

Alderon tanking too on unusually high volume.

Brand and emotion is important, but I would disagree with anyone who said that this was the main difference between an iPhone and a Galaxy (ie. they're both just as good and well designed, but somehow Apple has this great brand so people think it's better). The brand is the result of making better products for a long time; the products aren't better because they have a good brand, the brand gets better because the products are good. People get cause and effect mixed up in that one sometimes. The experience of a product is composed of all the little things put together. What comfort is it to your mother that the specs are similar on paper if when she uses a phone she gets annoyed more often and things aren't as easy/fun/nice/secure?

Prices of those components will go down - many of the individual components will commoditize - and Apple will benefit from those lower costs as well as others. Almost certainly the overall price of iPhone goes down over time, but the product itself can maintain superior margins and profitability if it remains a superior product. You are missing the forest for the trees. It's like saying that a Martin Scorsese film is just a bunch of frames of people talking and doing stuff, shot with ordinary cameras under ordinary lights.. Why is that so special? You have a spec list mental model, but consumers think at the product level. For a decade people bought more expensive iPods when they could've bought much cheaper mp3 players. The only thing that killed the iPod is Apple making a much better iPod inside a smartphone. People have been paying more for iPhones for 7 years now because they feel its worth it, and if you look at it as a continuation of the iPod, they've been paying more for almost 15 years (same for Macs)... They're not magically immune, that's for sure, just like Porsche and Nike aren't immune to competition. They have to work hard to have better products. But I don't see any other company that has the ability to out-compete Apple right now. Nobody's set up to do that. When I see something, I'll be worried and reconsider. And Apple isn't worth any price either, so if the stock becomes really expensive, I'll reconsider too. Oh, and despite being a consumer product, the iPhone has been beating others in the enterprise because it is so desirable that companies are changing their IT rules to either allow BYOD or to buy iPhones outright... Not bad for a product that didn't target the enterprise and is more expensive than other smartphones.

Or it may grow as the global middle class becomes bigger and competition keeps stagnating (Galaxy S5 vs iPhone 6? That'll be interesting). We're not talking about $100k Teslas here, we're talking about sub-$1k phones that bring tons of real value to anyone's life and are considered must have. Not that hard to justify. Even if you could save a couple hundred bucks on a less desirable phone, what is that over the 2-3 years that most people keep their phones? Less than $5 a month? Remember, consumer products are not bought to do at a certain job at the lowest cost, otherwise whole industries wouldn't exist. iOS and OSX are what matters, and it's where having great engineers and designers matters. It's what differentiates their products from all the other PCs that run windows and all the other phones that run Android, and they are the platforms on which thousands of developers build. The fact that Pages isn't the best word processor matters relatively little. As for iTunes, it has its quirks and problems, but it's massively more successful than any other media software/store made by anyone else ever, and it further adds value to the whole ecosystem of products, differentiates, and locks in. And all those accounts with credit card info can be leveraged into future products too: http://i.imgur.com/IX0JXNs.jpg Apple's real weakness is in services (cloud stuff, maps, etc), but they're aware of that and it's an opportunity to improve, and they don't mind partnering with others when it makes sense (though they've been burned in the past). Facebook and Twitter support is built in the OS, Yahoo provides weather data, and the new Microsoft sounds like it'll make for a good partner too. At their scale, there are things that are harder to do than for others who have a few order of magnitude fewer customers... But f.ex., I expect them at some point to give you iCloud backup storage equal to the size of the storage on your device (ie. you buy a 32gig phone, you get 32 gigs of backup in iCloud)... They just have to first build a zillion datacenters to handle the hundreds of millions of devices...

Brian Dalton is quite the multi-talented individual ;)