Linked List: May 15, 2013

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Passages From Isaacson Book Part of DOJ Case Against Apple in Ebook Price-Fixing Case ★

Reuters:

Apple disputes this in a second filing, also made on April 26 and released on Tuesday. It says that e-book demand “exploded” with Apple’s iPad launch, and the average retail price of an e-book dropped to $7.34 from $7.97.

In a filing released on Tuesday, the Justice Department said that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO at the time, “conceded the price-fixing conspiracy” when he told his biographer that Apple had “told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’”

If anyone else at Apple had revealed this to a writer, they’d have been fired (by Jobs) immediately. I question Jobs’s judgment in picking Isaacson to write the book in the first place, but no matter who he’d chosen to write the book, he should have held himself to the same standards he held his employees to when it came to keeping the company’s internal workings private.

NYT: ‘U.S. Now Paints Apple as “Ringmaster” in Its Lawsuit on Ebook Price-Fixing’ ★

Edward Wyatt and Nick Wingfield, reporting for the NYT:

In July 2010, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, told the chief executive of Random House, Markus Dohle, that the publisher would suffer a loss of support from Apple if it held out much longer, according to an account of the conversation provided by Mr. Dohle in the filing. Two months later, Apple threatened to block an e-book application by Random House from appearing in Apple’s App Store because it had not agreed to a deal with Apple, the filing said.

After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

Eddy Cue, hardball player.

David Trainer: The Man Who Figures Apple Is Worth $240 a Share ★

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

I watched Trainer’s CNBC appearance (best line: “Steve Jobs was the Bo Jackson of CEOs”). I read his blog post. I looked up ROIC in Investopedia. I studied his Apple model.

I couldn’t make any sense of it. Maybe you can.

Nope, me neither. (Keep in mind, at the end of last quarter, Apple held $153 worth of cash and investments per share. Just cash. Trainer is saying Apple’s entire future is worth about $90 per share, about $85 billion total.)

Update: Ethan Jewett on Trainer’s weird math and wrong numbers.