Research

Here is an exchange with Robert van Apeldoorn, Journalist with Trends Tendances Magazine in Belgium. (www.trends.be/fr). The exchange took place in early September via e-mail.

Robert: -Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is considered in Europe as a way to push growth, and is a target of national and EU policies (digital growth,etc), but the result seems to be a failure: the European computer industry (hardware) is almost dead (ICL, Siemens computers bought by Fujitsu, Olivetti almost out of computer business, Nixdorf dead) since the 90’, and the telco industry seems to be in crisis. All European companies are out of the handset business (big and fading exception is Nokia, but with  American software), and Alcatel is suffering with telco equipement manufacturing. It seems that at best, Europe can be a good niche player, with companies like ARM (chips). Technology seems to be reduced to localized services (computer services), some software businesses. What do you thing about that point of view? Is it correct or exaggerated ?
What will remain to the European companies ?

The main problem is perphaps the creation of European platform/ecosystems. Almost all are American today: Apple IOS-iTunes, Android, Amazon,…

Why Symbian didn’t succeed as a competitive platform ?

Is it possible to create European platforms? After all, IOS succeed after a short period of time.

What are the European tech companies that could play an important role in the near future ?

My answer: You are correct in this observation. Europe has failed to generate growth on the basis of ICT. The reasons are that the rate of change in ICT is rapid and getting more so. If European businesses require intervention, support or other forms of assistance in terms of policy, the time for that coordination to take effect is longer than the cycle time of disruption.

Almost all growth has come from companies that entered the space. Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook and even Microsoft came into positions of power from outside the industries they entered. Policy tends to offer means of sustaining incumbents or finding "logical" or defensible entrants. I should mention that the problem of industrial policy failing is not unique to Europe. Japan and to a lesser degree Korea are also facing crises of innovation due to policies designed to sustain rather than disrupt.

It's understandable given the need to justify spending other people's money. No policy maker wants to spend it recklessly. However, the process of unforeseen growth is, well, unforeseeable. It cannot be predicted and it's very likely to come from somewhere other than where you expect it.

This quickly becomes a lengthy discussion, but fundamentally the innovation process is chaotic. It's very similar to the process of artistic creation. The crisis in innovation comes from not having sufficient chaos. If Europe wants to preserve, sustain, nurture, and maintain it will do so at the expense of creative destruction. Nobody likes chaos but everybody wants innovation. Unfortunately they are concurrent things.

thank you very much for these interesting answer. Usually the answer is the lack of venture capital or the compartimented market.

So Nokia was an exception ?

If a lack of venture capital is the problem then what is the cause of a lack of venture capital? There is plenty of capital on the continent. Why should it not be allocated to ventures? Capital markets in Europe are quite free and liquid and capital will find the best opportunities. The problem is that there are few fundable opportunities.

I think Nokia was not an exception in the sense that it was not a "managed" success. The company (and Finland) emerged from a crisis in the early 90s. The crisis forced a re-evaluation of priorities and the success of Nokia could be attributed to a lack of emphasis in what was considered sustaining at the time (consumer electronics, TVs, natural resources, etc.) Entry into mobile phones was not what policy would have suggested was the biggest opportunity at the time. The market for mobile phones was projected to be insignificant in comparison to what was seen as success of the time (Sony, et. al.)

[Addendum: What are policy makers suggesting as the key investment themes? Which projects get funding today and which don't?]

comScore reports that US smartphone penetration has decisively crossed over 50% in August. This should not come as a surprise as the penetration rate has been very linear.

Now that we've crossed this milestone, the thing to watch is the conversion rate from smartphone non-consumption to smartphone consumption.

The reason is that we don't know what "saturation" means in smartphones. We can assume it's at least 80% as about 80% of new phones being purchased are smartphones. What we don't know is how much above 80% it can be. It could  be 100% if feature phones simply stop being made but we can't be sure if there will be latent demand and how long this will last (similar to the market for black-and-white TVs after Color became commonplace).

To help keep an eye on this measure, the following graph shows the rate at which non-smart to smart conversion is happening.

It measures the addition of new (to smart) subs each week in a particular measurement period (three months ending the month shown on the x-axis). There is also a 3 period moving average shown as a line. Keep in mind that this shows net new users and therefore excludes smartphone switchers. It's a good measure of how rapidly non-consumers are being converted to consumers.

The data shows that there are as many first time smartphone adoptions in late 2012 as there were in late 2010. Or, the new-to-smart users are joining ecosystems just as quickly when penetration is 50% as when it was 20%. An encouraging situation when considering the opportunity space above 50%. The "S-curve" has not reached an inflection point.

If you're thinking about growth, so far so good. There is however one surprise in the data.

All the growth in the last 24 months (between 2010 and present) was due to Android and iOS. Android added 50 million and iOS added 26 million in the last 24 months. The net smartphone user additions were about 60 million (RIM lost about 12 million, Windows lost 1.5 million and others lost 2.6 million). Android therefore has gained twice as many users as iOS has in this two-year period. Put another way, Android captured 70% of the growth and iOS captured 30% of the growth.

However, if we look at the last 12 months, the split is 23.5 million for Android and 17.0 million for iOS. Android gained 58% of the growth and Apple captured 42%--a change in "spread" from 40 points to 16 in favor of Android.

The evidence also shows itself in the trajectory of platform market shares of installed base.

In the last six months, Android share growth is slowing while iOS is still gaining.

If this trend continues then the next 50% may not behave as one might expect (namely that late adopters would take the low-cost commodity offering accelerating Android adoption.) Late adopters may, in fact, be choosier than early adopters. And it's not at the cost of overall growth. Late adopters are still converting at the same rate of the early adopters.

Therefore, paradoxically, the late market shows that the prospect for iOS growth seems strong. Furthermore, as we do reach saturation, perhaps in another three years, the secular growth may end in the US but the loyalty of iOS usage may give iOS another advantage in a market where growth is determined by "platform churn"

The US is the crucible of the phone market in many ways so what happens in the US may be a harbinger for what happens world-wide.

The following article is published in Filmmaker Magazine. Fall 2012, Vol. 21 #1.

There is a saying I once heard: "Once you change the method of distribution, the product has to change."

This itself is a take on the idea that distribution defines the product. You see this around you every day in the products you buy. Cars are influenced by the dealership networks that sell them. Phones by the mobile network operators and the choice of computer you use at work by whatever the IT department or value added reseller prefers to work with. Mass market restaurants offer what can be sold by wholesalers--typically frozen, long shelf-life staples. Almost every product category is shaped more by what can be distributed than what can be produced. That's simply because in mature economies distribution is harder than production. In consumer products it requires access to wholesalers who then require access to shops who themselves have access to prime real estate which attracts foot traffic. Production only requires capital. Distribution requires relationships, often exclusive ones.

This pattern is even more pronounced when looking at media products. Production is arguably easier since it's constrained by talent, which is fungible. But distribution is even harder as it is addressing bigger audiences in shorter time frames. You see this lopsided balance of power in the abundance of books being written relative to those being published. There are thousands of films produced and hundreds get distributed.

But the saying suggests that if distribution were to change then the product itself would change. Indeed, if you can sell ebooks direct, then they tend to evolve into new genres (e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey). If you can sell cheap adult video online it tends to evolve into new genres as well (I'll leave examples to the imagination.) YouTube videos quickly cluster around "Fail" or "Win" compilations which evolved from America's Funniest Home Videos. They get millions of views. Even before the Internet, the availability of cable created the genre of music video, which created the first music broadcast alternative to radio. And of course, cinema itself redefined theater once it could get shown to millions rather than thousands. The new methods of distribution of media affected what gets produced rather than the other way around. Consider the converse: innovative filmmakers who try new storytelling methods are stymied by a lack of acceptance by existing distributors and find their material languishing in festivals or perpetual cult status.

So we can re-state the saying to a new "Law of new media": Once you change the method of distribution, the medium itself has to change.

I gave examples of how Internet distribution changed some media formats. However, the Internet itself has not had any effect on long-form cinema so far. In fact, you would be able to tell if Internet distribution did work by watching if the product would change. So far, it seems, at least to me, that the commercially successful product has not changed. One reason has been that film is still a very difficult product to distribute digitally as most of the world does not have the capacity to buy, consume and enjoy films digitally. Another is that the current distributors have had an allergic reaction to the option. As existing products have been crammed into the new distribution chain (e.g. Netflix) the established distributors are experiencing channel conflict and are raising the costs of digital distribution rights. Netflix has seen its costs triple as it ate into Cable market share. Fundamentally, the incumbent distributors are reluctant to open a channel of distribution which conflicts with or reduces margins of the existing channels.

This brings up another corollary: fundamentally, you can’t move an existing media to a new network. You have to think of it as a deeply rooted-in system, and it's just not going to like moving to another environment. You have to uproot this huge tree, and it just won’t come out and if it did it will not take root in a new place.

The only way to create this new value network around new distribution is to plant a new tree.

This is the problem for the technology industry today. The only way technology companies can solve the “content is king” dilemma (which, by the way, is an euphemism for "Hollywood is king and Silicon Valley isn't"), is by allowing new content to flourish on top of new platforms. It’s not about moving the old content to the new platform. It’s about allowing new content to be created exclusively on the new platforms. This new content will therefore, by our law, be a new medium.

For me, apps are that new medium. Apps offered a new way to package entertainment for “niche time”. The early fart apps evolved into a whole new genre of games which are now challenging the established game studios. The result is that a generation of developers has moved from building PC or web software to apps with cloud back-ends. The first to switch to this new medium were those with the least to lose and with the most modest of goals. Apps have now a more valuable industry than digital music with over 55 billion installs between the iPhone and Android ecosystems. Consumers are increasingly spending their spare time in front of apps. In the US “app consumption” increased from 43 min/day in 2010 to 94 min/day at the end of 2011. This number already exceeds the time spent in web consumption. I find it difficult to doubt that app time will exceed TV time, especially as TV time is increasingly a dual screen experience.

(Feels like it needs one sentence explaining why. Is it because of their accessibility to small developers, or their ability to reach mobile handsets natively, or because of consumer trend?) If it’s absolutely impossible to move long-form video or long-form cinema to this new medium in such a way that everyone in the world can consume it on every device, then the app ecosystems will take up that challenge and say, “There’s a job to be done, and that’s to enertain people for an hour-and-a-half with characters, plots and wonderful stories, and we will make that happen, and we’ll call this thing an app.”

And that app will solve that job for that person. It's what's happening to the game console business. The new game apps are distributed differently, priced differently and produced differently. As a result they are used differently and make a different set of developers thrive.

The new app media will mean that we’ll just have to live in app universes, and go eat popcorn somewhere else. Microsoft and Google and Apple and Amazon and anybody else whose belly is at the bar has been scratching their heads wondering "How do we move that content over to us?" They've been barking up the wrong tree. The fundamental question isn't how to cram old media into a new shiny screen. It is how do you let developers and artists and creative people create stuff that is new and compatible with this new way of living.

Think also about the history of media -- movies haven't been around forever; music hasn't existed as a recorded medium forever. Not even books. What did people do before these forms of expression? We think of the use cases of going to the movies, or the use cases of sitting in front of a TV on Sunday night, or playing a console game. These things didn’t get done at some point in time. Nor will they be done at some future point in time.

In a few years we’ll move on and we won’t do those things. Each person will probably have his own screen in front of them--many already do--and whatever we do together we’ll do through a shared screen. We won’t have communal experiences that we associate with the old media. Certainly not in a theater. Maybe not even in a living room. And that is how we will move into a new value network.

It is inevitable. As a technology provider, you shouldn’t try to squeeze a 19th-century model into a 21st-century model. Just let it go. Create a platform and give people the freedom to create on it. As a media creator, you should try to learn what the new model demands. New forms of interaction, new story telling opportunities, new ways to communicate with audiences. Create experiments and learn. It's the only way.

In previous posts I described the patterns of asset value growth for Property Plant and Equipment at Apple and how that change has been thus far correlated to the production of iOS devices.

The analysis was based on looking at the declared value of the PP&E assets on Apple's balance sheet. These values include depreciation so they reflect not only the "spending" on new assets but also the value lost due to wear and tear. As such it's not a perfect measure of investment.

The better approach is to use declarations on the cash flow statement. Apple reports a specific cash flow related to PP&E: Under Investing Activities, Payments for acquisition of property, plan and equipment.

In the latest 8-K the amount for the 12 months ended September 29 the value was $8.295 billion.

Compare this with the statement in the Annual Report from one year ago:

The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $8.0 billion for capital expenditures during 2012, including approximately $900 million for retail store facilities and approximately $7.1 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.

Compare also with the PP&E net asset value on the Balance Sheet currently at $15.452 billion but valued at $7.777 billion a year ago (an increase of $7.7 billion).

This means that Apple intended to spend $8 billion, actually spent $8.3 billion and realized a net asset gain (after depreciation) of $7.7 billion.

So there are no major surprises. The spending was only about 4% above expectations a year earlier.

The other pattern to observe is that the spending rose dramatically into the fourth quarter. The fiscal quarterly spending was:

1. $1.32 billion
2. $1.46 billion
3. $2.06 billion
4. $3.46 billion

I illustrate this pattern (and previous quarterly spending) in the following chart.

The question remains what is this $8.3 billion being spent on?

To help answer I also added the comparable spending (from cash flow statements) of a few other technology companies. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have been spending in the same range of $500 million per quarter. Over the past eight quarters the average spending of these companies has been:

• Amazon $487 million
• Microsoft $583 million
• Google $800 million

Intel is different. Its average spend level has been $2.6 billion/quarter.

But Apple has just spent about 30% more than Intel. And it spent three times in Q3 than Google, 4.8x Microsoft and 3.8x Amazon.

The level of spending and growth from a far lower level implies to me that Apple is spending primarily on process equipment (aka tooling) rather than servers. Data centers are expensive at $1 billion for a large one, but they are not being built fast enough to account for $3.5 billion in one quarter.

Note that Apple's CapEx is above that of Intel whose fab-based semiconductor production method is known as particularly capital intensive. And Intel's Capital Expenditures have been increasing to all-time highs.

If Apple spent at Google levels on server infrastructure it would only be spending a quarter of what it's actually spending. If Apple spent on production at Intel levels it would only be spending three quarters of what it's spending.

In other words, Apple is spending at the equivalent of one Intel of fabrication and one Google of server infrastructure.

In a few days we will learn what the plan for expenditure for fiscal 2013 is. Historically, the company has roughly doubled spending for each year of the iOS platform. If that continues then Apple will be spending the equivalent of several Intels and several Googles.

As the following graph shows Apple gross margins and its operating margins have both been on a consistent upward slope since early 2006.

The reason is that the company has moved to more mobile devices as a percent of products shipped. Whereas Macs have had decent margins by the standard of the PC industry, they are not as profitable on a unit basis as iPods, iPhones or iPads. As portable or mobile products grow rapidly, it would follow that margins would as well.

However, the growth is not monotonic. There are occasional dips in gross margins. The cause is the launch of new device versions. On the following graph I show the launch times for the iPhone versions and the company's gross margin as well as my estimates for iPhone and other product line margins.

The general pattern is clear: each new version of the iPhone causes a dip in gross margins. This is not surprising as the company forewarns of this (in a decidedly exaggerated manner.) But why does it happen?

The iPhone is a profit monster, but when it launches there are many costs associated with it: components tend to be more expensive, there are more warranty returns, there are higher shipping costs are units are shipped in smaller lots to more points of sale. Tim Cook explains as "In terms of costs, with each new product we see learning curves associated with ramping production."

Every launch causes an amplification of these learning effects. With each dip in margins however, comes another surge as the learning is complete and the volumes of the new generation product begin to dwarf the previous. And so the process continues.

There is an asymptotic limit to margins as they cannot grow higher than whatever the iPhone yields but that's not yet in sight. The upper bound is probably in the 50% range.

The iPad grew shipments at 26% y/y but "sales" as measured by sell-through were up 44%. Detail from Tim Cook's discussion:

"The June to September [sequential change] was 17 million to 14 million…   as we had talked about in the July call, the June quarter contained 1.2 million increase in channel inventory and so … the comparison looks very different than our reported [shipment] numbers do… On a year-over-year basis, because of the year ago quarter having also a channel inventory build as we stock the channel to the [proper] level, the sell through year-over-year actually grew 44% and so the underlying sell through was extremely strong."

Sell-through, (or "sales" vs. "shipments") is a much better indicator of demand, obviously. Also see transcript for explanation of sequential decline (educational buying).

44% is not spectacular but it places the growth far more comfortably in the "high" bracket than the 26% units and 9% revenue growth that shipments data would indicate.

In the parlance of developers Apple keeps "throwing exceptions." This quarter the iPad surprised with a significant decline in sales growth. I placed a table showing the sales growth for this quarter as well as the previous 22 quarters at the bottom of this post.

Here is a quick review of each line:

1. The iPhone returned to a more customary growth rate (which I rate as Very Good--above 50%). The quarter was bound to be quirky due to it being both a transition quarter and a launch quarter. The launch of the iPhone 5 came quite late but not too late to make a contribution. It was also widely rumored and anticipated so there was slowing of the previous generation product. I expect growth to accelerate further in the last quarter of the year.
2. The Mac turned in a commendable 6% revenue growth (1% unit growth) on the back of the new 15" Retina screen MacBook. The average sales price increased sequentially and the mix of portables to desktops reached a new high of above 80%. More about the Mac will be written in a future post.
3. The iPod continued its decline. The 26% sales decline was in-line with other non-launch quarters. The company tipped its hand and let us know that iPod touch now makes up 60% of iPod volumes. At 3.2 million iPod touch units, it's a significant iOS contributor but still a declining number.
4. The iPad was painfully underperforming. With only 9% revenue growth, it was a complete reversal of the torrid growth of the last two years. Management blamed both anticipation of a new product and a reduction of inventory ahead of refresh of the larger screen retina. The only silver lining was that the average price decline was moderate (down about $3/unit). Overall, I'm very disappointed with the pause in the product but the new mini could change the character of the product dramatically in a way similar to how the iPod mini turbo-charged the iPod line.
5. iTunes had a very good quarter. It's the perennial growth engine with the most consistent performance throughout the time period shown. It was the second fastest growing line item firmly in the "High" growth bracket.
6. Peripherals, including Apple TV had a moderate quarter. Management revealed that about 5 million Apple TV units shipped in the fiscal year. That adds up to a half-billion dollar revenue business. Peripherals had $2.8 billion over the same time frame so Apple TV was about 18% on a yearly basis. This does not include content revenues.
7. Software had a modest growth of 22% but has come to be the high end of the range. Since changing the way it prices OS X updates, the era of Apple software windfalls is over. Still, at nearly $1 billion per quarter it's nice pocket change, especially as it's nearly all margin.
8. The overall top line (net sales) was a bit improved sequentially (+4 points of percent) but still in the "transition quarter" range of moderate growth. The company may be shifting its launch cycles and as a result we're seeing a break in pattern. As pricing for iPhone and iPad did not change very much the slowing of top line growth is entirely due to a unit shipment reduction. Again, the primary cause is transitions in multiple lines simultaneously.
9. The bottom line (earnings) followed the same pattern as top line (slight sequential increase in growth). There was a slight attenuation of margins (gross margins are down to 40%).

Overall, the quarter was not up to the recent level of performance for Apple. Growth was overall "moderate".

AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have all reported the number of iPhone units shipped in Q3 2012. The history of the these sales is shown in the following graph:

Read more:

Foreshadowing iPhone sales | LinkedIn.

Having reached 100 million iPads shipped in 2.5 years the natural question is how long will it take for the next 100 million iPads?

The ramp of cumulative units shipped is shown below.

 

I also added the equivalent ramp for the iPhone. [The last data point for the iPad is based on an estimate of 16.5 million units in Q3 which may need revision depending on company reporting.]

The next 100 million will depend to a large degree on the success of the new iPad mini. To make an estimate we have to realize that there are several aspects of the tablet market which differ from the phone market and that therefore the predictive power for previous data is weak.

First, the channels are different. Tablets are sold as media consumption or "computing" products. They are not sold as communication devices. Therefore operators have few incentives to promote and subsidize them. They do participate in the distribution but not with the same level of commitment. That means less "push" and opportunity for discovery. Apple has an advantage in this case with their stores and brand value. The lack of operator engagement and lack of points of sale might be one reason why Android tablets have not ramped as quickly.

Second, for some competitors, the tablet itself is a loss leader and acts more as a terminal into an ecosystem rather than a product in itself. In cases where tablets are given away it's possible that consumers might own one for each platform or ecosystem. This is similar to the game console model where the cost of the console is not a barrier to many avid gamers. This means that penetration of tablets can reach above 100% of users in some markets. Although network connections (i.e. SIM cards) can and do reach well above 100%, the number of phones in use by one person simultaneously is bounded.

Third, the lifetime of the product is as yet undetermined. Phones tend to last 2 years. This is due to evolving standards as well as high wear and tear and breakage or losses. Tablets are not as "mobile" and are less likely to be used and the basic functionality does not evolve as rapidly. It's possible that replacement rates for tablets will follow more that of notebook computers than phones. Perhaps between 2 and 4 years. I suspect most iPads purchased are still in use today, including the first version. There will be some obsolescence from system upgrades, but the older systems will keep going.

Some of these aspects of the product could lead to slower growth and some to faster growth. That and the fact that it's a completely new category with business and consumer and educational and vertical applications makes it a difficult product to forecast.

Having said that, the product is extremely resonant with buyers. The growth to 100 million is testament to that. The liquidity of the product, with no carrier locking and no pricing illusions means that it reaches all parts of the world quickly. So there is no obvious upper bound on the size of population who might buy it. The new price points and form factor may lead to a wave of new adoption, similar to the impact the iPod mini had on the iPod line.

There are still many factors that can slow growth, especially production capacity, but I believe that the iPad could growth between 50% and 80% which would mean 100 million more iPads could be sold by the end of 2013.

Days after Nokia announced the end of life for the Symbian platform I wrote a post titled Who will buy the next 150 million Symbian smartphones? The reference was to claim by management that before there would be a complete transition to Windows Phone, 150 million legacy Symbian phones would be sold, keeping the company financially stable before the new ecosystem took root.

I reproduce the original forecast I made below with the addition of what actually happened.

[Note that the Actual stack area chart is independent of the forecast area chart as indicated by shading.]

My forecast in early 2011 was based on the 150 million Symbian phones being sold over a two year transition period. The implication with the forecast for Windows Phone was that this would still lead to a difficult contraction of volumes.

As it turns out, only 96 million Symbian devices have been sold in the 7 quarters since the platform was deprecated. It's unlikely that there will be ever by 150 million units sold as last quarter only 3.4 million shipped. In any case, management has already retracted that claim.

What about the Windows Phone forecast? It turns out that by this point in time (Q3 2012) I had expected Lumia shipments to total 9 million. Actual shipments reached about 9.5 million, so not bad. However, the market grew faster than I had expected and overall Nokia smartphone market share turned out to be slightly lower (6.3% in Q2 vs. 10% estimated.)

The just ended quarter shares are not yet available but it's quite possible that overall Nokia smartphones could be well below 5%, and may slip to 3% during the transition period.

My warning in February 2012 was that 150 million Symbian units would not ship since I expected there would be a stigma associated with the products among distributors, even if consumers were fine with them (which they weren't).

The public execution of Symbian (and any other alternative being developed inside Nokia) will probably be a classic case study in disruption management. To wit: even if a platform needs to be led out to pasture, there are ways of managing decline other than suicide. Nokia's failure is not so much having chosen the wrong alternative to Symbian, but having chosen exclusively.

However, there's a twist. The company did not accept exclusivity of one supplier without a concession: In exchange for exclusivity, Nokia negotiated $250 million every quarter in the form of "platform support payments" from Microsoft. Nokia has to date received over $1 billion in such payments. (For the last quarter that amounts to $86 for each Lumia phone shipped.)

The tragedy comes from this $1 billion/yr not being enough. The foregone revenues from Symbian (assuming they had been able to maintain the decline to the level of 150 million units that they had originally forecast) would be about $9 billion. This means that had Nokia not knifed Symbian and had sold the shortfall units at an average price of $200 they would have received an additional $9 billion in sales. Furthermore, assuming a margin of 33% for those units, Nokia received from Microsoft one third from of what she gave up for exclusivity.

In other words, the net cost of the Microsoft exclusive relationship is at least $2 billion in operating profit.

This turns out to be the difference between being profitable and being distressed.

We will never know if this scenario would have ever happened, but the forecast management made 21 months ago suggests that at least they thought this was what they were going to get out of the bargain.

This reminds me of another article posted around the same time.

My talk at the Arctic 15 conference October 18th in which I review the data on App Store performance and question the viability of intermediaries in content distribution.

Reflects and complements my recent Omnivorous App post.

Appocalypse Now.

Requires the (free) Perpective™ app and an iPad.