BlogAllAlong

July 1st, 2008

“Dear Valued Customer,

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Apple are just living great times now, perhaps their best ever, no question about it. New Touch-Screen iPods coming on the way, Apple dominating over %60 of the MP3 Players market share, iPhone have sold over 1.5 million units, and with their super deal with AT&T for $18/month for each unit, that means extra monthly income, Leopard 10.5 is released with 300+ new features that reviewers say easily out beats Vista. All that and more have pushed the Apple stock price up more and more, and now for the firs time in history, Apple is worth officially more than IBM!

I my self have no problem with that at all, I’ve never been an IBM fan, and Apple products don’t really suck. Well they suck a lot of money, but that’s most of what they suck. I’ve got an iPod and am waiting for right time to get a Macbook as well.  If I was in the stock market business right now I may be holding some Apple shares as well. I was few years back and had my eyes on them anyways. However one thing keeps concerning me every time I see them moving forward. They are still a one man show company. Microsoft started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The latter resigned after suffering some disease, and Bill is about to leave full time job. However both have been away from the real work for quite long time, and while the company haven’t been moving as fast as it was in the old days, it’s still in a steady state I believe.

Apple however is different. Apple have lost, well gave away, Steve Jobs for over a decade and Apple almost went bankruptcy. Steve Jobs came back in 98 to shake things up, and in less than a decade, he made Apple larger than IBM. So who could replace him, not only as a technical brain but also as a figure that is worshiped y many, if it’s right for me to say it. He’s got the marketing skills, and as some call him, he is a deal making machine. He has the ability to reach strong deals, like the iPhone and AT&T. If such figure is lost, one has only to wonder what would happen to that company. First thing to do is to let go their shares until things settle down a bet I’d say.

There was a study more than a year back about the Future of the company, and who could take up the role of Jobs later on. In a nutshell, the study points out Apple have reported they have successor plans but are still confidential. If that is true, I hope there are preparations already taking place. You never know when you could lose a person you know. Even if such successor plans are in place, I think a wiser decision was made here by Bill Gates to step down and watch how the ball rolls without him. That way he can assist from far away until things are settled. I am not saying Apple can afford to do the same thing right now, but at least they can give some space for new comers. I mean come on, when was the last time you saw a new product presented by anyone other than Steve Jobs? I don’t follow all Apple events, but whenever I see one, it’s Jobs in the picture.

I am full of hope I’ m wrong here, but it’s something that keeps me worried.

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You can see the post about Gulf Salary Increase Report 2007 on Q8Ba7th Blog. If you are into finance, or living in the Gulf, you will find the information useful to you.

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Once again every 3 months, we read a similar article. Google’s quarter revenue has exceeded expectations, and the stock price goes up again as always. Eric Schmidt talks in pride about how strong their core business is, and how it keeps getting stronger and stronger with time. This is really great, and I as a Google believer have no doubt about it. But what Mr. Eric is trying smartly to hide here is Google’s failure to generate revenue in any other type of business. Google Answers closed last year, Google Checkout is so bad it has rating 4.2 (up from 3/10 two months back) on CNET, Google Apps is also not getting the best of reviews they hoped for. Google is expanding in many areas, I’m not sure how successful they are with the new advertising channels they entered, but anything that has nothing to do with advertising is just not going through. A reason for some analysts to say Google has a weak business foundation that could collapse in any minute.

So how could Google really fall down? I don’t think that would happen anytime time soon, but with the next wave of evolution:

• New advertising mechanism that would outperform Google: Google so far is trying to get into what ever advertising model there is, so it’s very unlikely.
• New major advertising channel: Every month we hear of a new booming site that is having strong community gathering. Search engines rush in acquiring those startup sites. But if one day, a very strong solid community starts building it’s own advertising solution, and this is where Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon are trying to get into, they could start drawing advertiser’s attention quickly with competitive prices compared to how keyword price keeps rising at Google.
• Google Killer, and I mean Google Search Engine killer. Since once you have that, many people are likely to ignore all the other Google features and just stick with what you have. Every year new search engines come (and go). We have seen Accoona, Ms. Dewey, the European Search Engine project, and many others who are trying to implement human like queries as well, something that Google have yet to seriously invest in sometime soon. There is no real threat in the horizon what so ever, but continued attempts mean someday someone will hit the target, and then that might be it.

These are all just thoughts I have about Google and where they’re heading, despite how much I love and admire Google’s value and what they have to offer. What do you think?

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The Longest Journey and Dreamfall are two successful adventure games that were developed by Funcom. Even though I could not bare to finish The Longest Journey, being on of the most buggiest and boring adventure games I’ve ever played, others have still loved it crazy and it got quite high reviews from the fans. It was followed by the anticipated part 2 Dreamfall game, and the company seemed to be doing quite well. Today however I read in the news that Funcom, the developer of the adventure game series have decided to abandon all “offline” games development, and will go for the MMO games instead. The main reason behind that decision they say is the high ratio of games piracy. They estimate that over 200,000 illegal downloads of Dreamfall were made before it was even released! They estimate also that for every copy they sell, 3 to 10 illegal copies are made.

The numbers they have are really scary, however not very far from truth I can tell. I can hardly find someone who buys original software in Kuwait. They are more embarrassing and difficult to get, not to mention ridiculously expensive as well. The game which is available online for $18 is in our market for 16 KD!, that’s more than 3 times the price. Nevertheless, the decision is a clear message to gaming fans, and especially adventure gaming fans, piracy is hurting business seriously, and it’s affecting the strategy and trend of games being developed. I remember someone who said once, don’t worry, there are xxxxx stupid people buying original copies we won’t be harmed. Well, it seems now we are. If it wasn’t for those piracy, Lucasarts might have never unplugged the host on adventure games, and we wouldn’t have to go through this complex license activation procedure for each and every Sam & Max episode release. Not to mention Telltale will not have to share extra money with the online licensing company. So by paying a little for the games we love, we are supporting even greater games to come. More of a Win-Win situation here.

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Since the acquisition of YouTube and Google has been trying to justify, Google Video will not be killed. Few weeks back, Google started displaying YouTube results from within it’s Google Video search results. The result was that over 90% of the videos ended up with YouTube. I am not sure how the results are sorted however between Google Video and YouTube, but in general, you see YouTube results on top. So the question is, does people still care to upload their videos to Google Video? The answer could be yes if you want less competition over videos, your video can make it easier to top 100 on Google Video. If you are thinking about selling your videos there, commercial Videos seems to have fallen apart I can no longer see pay-per-view clips. It still seems people look at Google as a FREE service provider, what ever fee based service Google opens for the public fails.

The way Google are utilizing the service now seems to be different. The trend seems to be about finding application specific usage for it rather than community posting videos. Google Video Ads is one way they are trying to benefit from the service. It’s still brand new, but it is expected to take off as soon as they have the right content. I would definitely want to post game video ads on my site. I think it would bring higher traffic. Today also, I came to know that Google have started to deliver Video Ads on it’s Google Finance page. Reuters, Forbes and Standard & Poors are delivering the feeds. Theoretically, they could still use the YouTube service to power all their applications, but this is one company Google acquired and decided to let it run separately.

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The Administration of Customs in Kuwait announced two days back that they are in the process of cancelling custom fees on computer and mobiles, two of the 245 items that will be excused from customs. Does that mean we will have cheaper devices in the market? I doubt it. At least not on a large scale, and not for long, before prices rise up again for the advantage of the sellers.

The good news however, is for personnel shipping their items from outside, a habit that is becoming more popular. Over the past few months, I have brought two MacBook Pros from outside for friends of mine. One time, I had to pay customs, and another time they passed it. Even when I had to pay customs 50 KD ($172), along with the shipping and all. The whole thing cost 750 KD ($2590 approx) compared to the local 930 KD price ($3208 approx), which is not available most of the time, and also has lower specs. What is worse when you shop here is that, sellers have absolutely no idea about what they are selling. The most they can do is read the laptop specs for you and tell you their price. When I managed to get the item here without customs, the whole thing with shipping cost no more than 700 KD ($2415).

Source: Alqabas Newspaper. Google translated version available here.

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