If you’ve followed my work here, you know that I’ve been a little tough on Nintendo as of late, saying that the game company is in deep trouble, and by the look of things, doesn’t have a strategy in place to turn things around so quickly.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve received some e-mails from folks about Nintendo and my comments on the company. Those folks say that Nintendo will always be a hardware-focused firm, and the very thought of playing its titles on other consoles is a joke.
Down here in Texas, we invented the State Fair. That may not technically be true, but everything you know and love to hate about state fairs, we invented. The Corny Dog came from Texas (and yes, you’ve been spelling it wrong all this time). Put a stick in a hotdog, dip it in batter and fry it, and you’re halfway to Dallas. Fried butter? Suck it, Iowa. We’ve had fried butter in Texas for years. And fried beer. And deep fried frito pie, which is fritos topped with chili and cheese, somehow dipped in batter and deep fried into a mound of goodness. Take a whiff. Ahhhh . . . wait, don’t smell the air. We’re at Air Quality Level Orange down here, so maybe you should just look at the pretty pictures.
When I use Netflix, Amazon’s streaming service, and all the others out there, I can’t help but think about film studios. I analyze their decision-making, I see where they place their content, I hear what they have to say about entertainment and its relation to technology today, and I can’t help but come to one simple conclusion: these companies are clueless.
Sony could very well have made its best decision in years by dropping the price of its PlayStation 3 console $50 earlier this week. Now, consumers can get their hands on the 160GB model for $249 or the 320GB option for $299. And in the process, the company, which also announced a Europe-only PSP, called the E-1000 for £99, has put the onus on Microsoft to respond with a price cut of its own to match its chief competitor.
Necessary. It’s like a dirty word. A curse, or at least it was at my house. Activities were defined on a scale of how “necessary” they were. Snagging a couple Tagalongs before dinner. Is that necessary? Want to drive 20 miles to visit my girlfriend on a school night. Is it necessary to see her before the weekend? Waiting in line at midnight for the new Sonic the Hedgehog game (it was the 90s, after all). Definitely unnecessary. It is with those voices in my head that I read Mike Perlman’s column about whether tablet computers are “. . . Really Necessary.” Necessary? I consider myself an expert on battling the subject.
Each month, the NPD’s report on game sales disappoints. Sales are plummeting in both hardware and software, and many are wondering if it’s a result of the economy or something else. As far as I’m concerned, it’s about time we all admit that it’s something else. The economy might not be helping matters, but the way I see it, the real problem is that gaming habits are changing, and the products that we once bought just aren’t as valuable to us as they once were.
If you’ve been following the stock market lately, you know that things haven’t been going so well for most companies. Well, that is, except for one: Apple. The iPhone maker has overtaken Exxon Mobil to become the biggest company, by market capitalization, in the world.
That news followed reports last week, claiming Apple had more cash on-hand than the U.S. Treasury did as lawmakers tried to come up with a deal on the debt limit.
Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend about an HDTV he was planning to buy. He told me that he went down to Best Buy and looked over all the products the store had on display. After talking to a salesperson and looking at the pictures of all the televisions, he decided on a 55-inch Sony LCD.
How much did you pay for your tablet? If you picked up an HP TouchPad in the past day or so, you could have shaved anything up to $200 off the list price for the webOS slate, as HP and its retail partners kick off a round of aggressive discounting. It’s a risky way to boost sales: the TouchPad is a mere month into the market and met with mixed reviews, and it would be easy to see this as HP’s tablet project falling flat on its touchscreen face.
Apple released its new OS X Lion for Mac computers recently, and there was one controversial change that had the technorati chatting nonstop. In the new Lion OS, Apple changed the direction of scrolling. I use a MacBook Pro (among other machines, I’m OS agnostic). On my MacBook, I scroll by placing two fingers on the trackpad and moving them up or down. On the old system, moving my fingers down meant the object on the screen moved up. My fingers are controlling the scroll bars. Moving down means I am pulling the scroll bars down, revealing more of the page below what is visible. So, the object moves upwards. On the new system, moving my fingers down meant the object on screen moves down. My fingers are now controlling the object. If I want the object to move up, and reveal more of what is beneath, I move my fingers up, and content rises on screen.
Earlier this week, Apple made the surprising decision to allow users to buy television shows from the Apple TV. Upon doing so, users can have on-demand access to the shows by streaming them over the Web to their set-top box. In addition, Apple added Vimeo support to the device.
It’s quarterly earnings season, and while I don’t care much about differences in valuation multiples or whether a company beat EPS consensus by two cents a share – I’m a market analyst, not a financial analyst – quarterly earnings are a great place to find data indicating how the market is changing. Sometimes the best information is buried in the balance sheet and requires a bit of detective work and familiarity with how the company accounts for its products, divisions, tax strategy, and currency fluctuations. And sometimes you get lucky and the press release is all you need.
