Liberty

That's a good point. Walmart has lots of SKUs, but Costco has a relatively small selection. If I were them, I'd use Commerce Hub to broaden the inventory; much better for someone to find what they're looking for and buy it, even if it really comes from Commerce Hub (still some money for Costco), than to get an empty search result (which pushes them to Amazon and their large selection).

I've been trying to learn more about it too. Seems like a brilliant model at first glance; build scale to compete with Amazon by aggregating inventory from a bunch of established retailers that wouldn't be able individually to have enough scale and logistics expertise to compete. Reminds me a bit of some of what UPS did (not sure if they still do -- Thomas Friedman wrote about this a while ago): When you thought you were sending your laptop back to DELL for repairs, it actually went to UPS and they fixed it and shipped it back to you, all transparently to the customer. So if anyone can compete with Amazon online, I think it could be Commerce Hub. Walmart or Costco or Sears or Home Depot or whatever will never get there alone. But all of them together, they could have a shot. And the more Commerce Hub grows, the more its scale allows it to compete with Amazon on price and speed of delivery, which makes its individual partners comparatively less competitive against both Amazon and Commerce Hub. Because of that, the partners should be outsourcing more and more of their inventory to it over time to keep up, making them ever more dependent on Commerce Hub. Retailers won't like someone wedging themselves between them and their customers, but if the choice is that or getting raped by Amazon, they'll probably take Commerce Hub's 'virtual inventory' to beef up their offerings.

2.5-hour podcast about the original iPhone introduction 7 years ago: http://5by5.tv/prompt/30 Interesting to hear Jobs announce it and realize just how many of the things that we take for granted now were totally new at the time. The first reveal still gives me goosebumps. You can also watch the whole keynote on youtube, of course. I recommend it to those who hadn't seen it at the time.

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/01/post-annual-report-2013.html

Hour-long interview with Elon Musk and his brother, conducted by Jeff Skoll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kp6CMS9Uxc&list=TLFbj9TAw4Be1iIKHYriZhe6zD3_8TpTz6&noredirect=1

I've learned so much from Sanjeev's wise words, and I hope that the post that he wrote in the SHLD thread meant that he won't explicitly talk about what he owns and what he doesn't, but that he will still keep posting on the board and comment about various businesses and about his thinking on investing. It might be selfish of me to think this way, but I think we're all 'selfish' in wanting to learn more from Buffett, Munger, Berkowitz, etc. To me, Sanjeev fits in that lineup of great teachers.

Thanks, good news!

Latest proxy statement says: (sorry for the weird formatting)

15% of sales, during a month when there was a high-profile launch, not of installed base. Not surprising since pretty much all higher-end phones from non-Apple manufacturers are big (because they need the bigger battery to be competitive). If you call making something bigger or smaller "copying", you must really be up in arms at how Android phones copied the iPhone's hardware and software rather than keep going in the direction they were going before it came out, or how everybody came out with similar tablets after the iPad came out, etc. Heck, just the rumor that Apple was working on a watch was enough for everybody and their dogs to rush out crappy watches. I think Apple's bigger phone will look to be in family with the regular-sized iPhone 6, however that turns out to look. No reason to make it look like a iPad since a phone and a tablet have different design requirements.

The housing bubble certainly doesn't help in the medium-term, though.

I second that, happy birthday to the man with so much worldly wisdom to share!

If done responsibly, what's the difference with drinking? If it was legal, you'd probably see a lot more "respectable" people do it. Right now we only see the eccentrics because they don't give a crap what others think. The peple who care what others think because they are respectable either don't do it even if they'd like to once in a while, or hide. I don't smoke, and I don't drink much, but I don't see why one should be illegal and not the other, and why addiction should be treated criminally first rather than as a public health issue.

To answer one stereotype with another: You must not like many artists (writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians, painters, etc).

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303754404579308443948192068 Large phones have gotten a lot of media hype and do sell well, but I think there's a disconnect between the general perception and the real numbers. Apple taking its time and sticking to its 'tic-toc' approach with S model years was probably the right thing. After all, the iPhone screen did grow between the 4 and 5 models, so it's not like they did nothing. Now I expect the 6 to branch off in two sizes, and hopefully the bigger one will use the extra volume to do some cool stuff that isn't easy to do in the smaller model. Apple already leads in energy-efficiency (most competing phones that come close to the A7 in benchmarks are much bigger with bigger batteries and more surface to dissipate heat - smartphones that are iPhone-sized don't match it in power and battery life), so it'll be interesting what they can do with a much bigger surface for heat dissipation and much bigger battery.

You mean better or worse?

http://ir.libertyinteractive.com/events.cfm Liberty's CEO spoke for half an hour at CES, touched on things related to LMCA, LINTA and LVNTA.

I know, that's why I wrote "Comscore shows Apple's US share went up". The segmentation argument I made is even more important in global markets. The low-end is growing quite fast there, faster than in the US, no doubt, but Apple doesn't compete in that segment and not all customers have the same value. I wish these market share numbers had a drilldown for something like: under $200 $200-400 $400 and more (and equivalents in various international markets) You'd see how everybody except Apple is getting a lot of their volume in the first two categories, and then everybody turns around and directly compares market share points like they're all the same, comparing Apples and orange, so to speak.

Interesting. Comscore shows Apple's US share went up: http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/1/comScore_Reports_November_2013_US_Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share But market share as a whole doesn't matter much since Apple isn't playing in the low-end and that's where there's more growth. What matters is profit share and market share in the segments where they play (which happen to be the segments that matter to developers; if you're too cheap to spend on a phone, you won't spend on apps. Most of the low-end seems to be upgrading from feature phones but still using their new 'smartphones' as feature phones). f.ex. It's like if there's tons of growth in $15k cars. You could say that Porsche is losing market share if you look at the whole pie. But if you look at only the segments where they compete, they might be gaining market share, or growing at the same rate as that segment of the pie and not losing any.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-06/samsung-profit-misses-estimates-as-high-end-handset-growth-slows.html

Palantir, do you consider that Google's search engine has been innovative at any point of its history?

Where had you seen the iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc, before? If you come out with a Nomad, a Blackberry, and a Microsoft tablet, we can just drop this, it's pointless... I guess there's been no innovation between the Commodore 64 and the Mac Pro. A simple question for you: Give me some examples of what you consider innovation.

Isn't that what I said a few posts ago when I said that Apple wasn't first in almost anything? What makes them great is the user experience of their products, not that they have "first" bragging rights (that's worthless to a customer who has to use the thing). It doesn't make their products copies of what came before, though; if they were just that, I doubt they'd have had any success at all. You're missing the forest for the tree. A larger screen size or a color can be a nice thing, but in isolation it's worthless and obvious. What matters is how all the details combine together. If Blackberry had been the first with a retina screen, it wouldn't have mattered because the rest was inferior. The examples I showed were Android and Samsung basically taking as much of the look & feel of the user experience that took Apple years to develop. Nothing else was like that before, and everything was similar after. This isn't making a color shell or using a dropdown menu after someone else did...

I sincerely hope you're kidding.

Because that's how I've seen the word used by smart people. You didn't understand what I said. I agree innovation is making something new, I just don't agree with your restrictive definition of the "something" in that sentence. That something can be the final product/user experience even if it isn't made up of 100% new things. Just like two people using the same lego blocks, and one of them makes an "ok" thing and the other makes a really great, never seen before thing. That combination was innovative to me, but you'd say "it's the same lego blocks so it's just refinement, you would have had to invent new blocks".

You are focusing entirely on "new" and forgetting to look at "something". That something doesn't have to be a new category that nobody has even seen before, unless you believe that there was no innovation with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbooks, the iMac, etc, in which case you definitely are using the word differently from most smart people. Refining is taking a 1ghz CPU and bumping it to 1.2 ghz, not going from the 2007 Blackberry to the original iPhone.