Linked List: October 26, 2012

Friday, 26 October 2012

The Talk Show: ‘Looper’ With Rian Johnson 

This week on The Talk Show: very special guest Rian Johnson, writer-director of the hit movie Looper, joins Adam Lisagor and yours truly for an in-depth discussion of the film and the art of filmmaking. This is my favorite episode of the show to date.

Brought to you by two outstanding sponsors:

Amazon’s Quarter 

MG Siegler on Amazon’s quarterly results:

The company lost $274 million on sales of $13.81 billion. Yes, you read that right. Sure, a large part of it was due to the disaster that is the LivingSocial deal (a loss of $169 million as part of a goodwill write-down), but they still lost over $100 million when you take that away.

I’m sure Apple is really regretting not selling the iPad mini at Kindle Fire prices right now.

Yet here’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Forbes declaring that Amazon’s $274 million loss compares favorably to Apple’s $26 billion revenue/$8.2 billion profit quarter:

If you put that next to Apple’s lower iPad numbers, it suggests that the Kindle Fire is eating into iPad sales in a significant way. (iPad sales might also have been affected by expectations of the iPad mini.) If true, this is huge. Thus far, no tablet has been able to make a dent in Apple’s domination of the tablet market. Everybody has tried, but nobody had cracked even single-digit end-user marketshare, by most estimates. The Kindle might be changing that.

First, iPad sales did miss analyst expectations, but were still up 26 percent over the year-ago quarter. And let’s see what happens in the holiday quarter with the iPad Mini in the mix. Second, we’ll never know how Kindle Fire sales compare to the iPad because Amazon does not release unit sale numbers. Apple takes the heat on missing sales projections but none of its main competitors — Amazon, Samsung, or Google — even release those numbers.

I do think Jeff Bezos and Amazon are doing a great job, but there’s no way you can argue today that they’re anything but behind Apple in the tablet game.

From the Department of ‘Just Shut Up’ 

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, in an interview with Der Spiegel:

Mundie: My response is that we had a music player before the iPod. We had a touch device before the iPad. And we were leading in the mobile phone space. So, it wasn’t for a lack of vision or technological foresight that we lost our leadership position. The problem was that we just didn’t give enough reinforcement to those products at the time that we were leading. Unfortunately, the company had some executional missteps, which occurred right at the time when Apple launched the iPhone. With that, we appeared to drop a generation behind.

Spiegel: What happened?

Mundie: During that time, Windows went through a difficult period where we had to shift a huge amount of our focus to security engineering. The criminal activity in cyberspace was growing dramatically ten years ago, and Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target. In part because of that, Windows Vista took a long time to be born.

Don’t make excuses. And definitely don’t make lame excuses. This is just embarrassing.

(Via BGR.)

Apple Acknowledges UK Legal Judgment That Samsung Tablets Are Not as Cool as iPads 

Legally required burn on Samsung. Masterful copywriting on Apple’s part.