If you found a ship up on a ...mountain,

...sure it's a... vagina who parked it there! A known Greek proverb, that is. Being said about women being capable of impossible and irrational things. This time though you can't possibly blame a woman for bringing the Dutch cargo Artemis (Ancient Greek Goddess of hunting) ashore at les Sables d'Olonne in Britanny, can you?

I wonder though. Americans call their storms and hurricanes with (mostly) female names, like Katrina, for instance. In vain I tried to find out whether this European perfect storm had a name too. I couldn't find one. I am sure though, if they called it anything, it must have been a female name as well. To prove the Greeks right. About parking of ships up on a mountain...

Visit here for more spectacular shots of various sites in Europe during this recent storm.

;-)

It's the economy stupid...

Recently emerging as stand-alone devices with WLAN connectivity, Internet Radios make it possible to listen to the entire globe provided you can understand the local language of the broadcasting stations. Anyways... I was listening to the KIKK-CNN station from Houston, Texas this afternoon and burst to LMAO when the speaker told a news story about BMW closing down some of its ops in Germany (and subsequently cutting dozens of German jobs) to transfer the equivalent production facility (and create new jobs) to the US. The greenback is at its lowest rate vis-a-vis the Euro and Yen in our living memory and if you add to this the appallingly business-unfriendly social regimes applicable in most of the 'Socialist' governed Europe, it's no wonder that European companies with global reach are starting a new wave of outsourcing to the... US (yep, you heard right!). That's exactly what the broadcaster said holding her laughs. "The Europeans are outsourcing to the US', she said... "We just became... the new India".

Come to think of it, I wonder why it hasn't happened earlier. Outsourcing to China and India will inevitably transfer our western high-tech know-how to the Far East... at the same time, as the Chinese and Indians improve their own living conditions and standards, they become increasingly consumers of their own products they used to export to the countries that outsourced their ops there in the first place. Here's the mess. In the last few decades the geniuses of western capitalism killed systematically local manufacturing capacity and transferred it instead to the Far East. Little by little the Far East will end-up consuming many of the products manufactured locally and increasing local demand will drive prices higher. Inflation in China and India will inevitably push payrolls higher to avoid social unrest. Higher local payroll will hurt the margin advantage Westerners gained by outsourcing there in the first place. And we, in the West, will increasingly find ourselves with empty supermarkets and malls, double digit inflation and no capacity to produce what we need to consume. Our social security systems will collapse and pensions will become impossible to pay; we shall all have to become the new "third world" to which the nouveaux rich and famous from the East will "use" to outsource some of their own production.

Makes you think...

What a dilemma to deal with...

We learn (from financial analysts watching Apple quite closely) that for every unlocked iPhone sold and used with a different operator than ATT and the three Europeans selected for France, Germany and the UK, Apple potentially loses as much as 400-500 bucks a piece (not sure whether this is over the lifetime of the phone or annual miss, I reckon over the lifetime). Whatever. It's a good bunch of greenbacks. With about a million iPhones unlocked, do the math.

Here's the thing. If Apple decides to stop this and forces buyers to activate their phones at the POS they'll lose one in four buyers, or even more, meaning they may miss their 2008 year end 10 million unit target. And this is the last thing they wanna do.

On the other hand, if they continue their current practices they are going to lose much more in lost recurring revenue from unlocked phones. What to do then?

One thing I know for a fact, this whole thing of linking an iPhone exclusively to an operator is a pile of cowshit. They'd be much better off doing what the other big suppliers (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, etc) do for years now. Sell plain unlocked phones. But again... these Cupertino folks are those who invented "think different". It ain't different if you sell you cellphones just like Nokia, right?

Think about an alternative: Why focus on a target of 10M units and take ages to launch to mega markets like China, EU and India? Combined population of all three is shy of 3 Billion people. Maybe good for a market of more than 500,000 phones a year. Throw the right iPhone package to these markets and selling another 10 million units in the first year must be a slam-dunk.

I reckon the current Apple iPhone strategy smells very much like stubbornness El Jobso style. Like wanting to cure his pancreatic cancer with a simple diet. Well, nobody's perfect. Even his Jobness.

Guy Kawasaki vs. Monkey Boy

Quite an interesting interview from Microsoft's Vegas Mix 08 trade show. Kawasaki, an Apple evangelist and pioneer, was asked to interview Steve Ballmer, who, incidentally, makes quite a good impression of himself in this interview. To mere mortals like the rest of us, it's quite interesting to see what goes on (or not) in the head of a Microsoft CEO during his day-to-day life. The clip is quite long (about an hour) but worth watching, even by Mac addicts and converts like myself. BTW, if you wanna drop monkey boy a line here's his email : steveb@microsoft.com (says he, no filters and no PAs to stop you from sending him your ideas).

Simply the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

If you want to hear the Greatest talk about his work, go read this interview of his to Fortune Magazine. Worth the travel (surf I meant)...