MacDailyNews Take: Amazon’s charade, er… Kindle was Amazon’s “bestseller based on units ordered from November 15 through December 19” in their electronics category, followed by Apple’s iPod touch 8 GB, with the Garmin nuvi 260W 4.3-inch GPS in third place. As always, no specific sale figures were provided by Amazon, so we have no idea if Kindle, which available only via Amazon, outsold the specific 8GB iPod touch model on Amazon.com by 1 unit or 10 million during the Nov. 15 – Dec. 19 period. Perhaps tellingly, Amazon has never given any meaningful hard numbers regarding Kindle sales. Anyone who swallows Amazon’s Kindle PR is a rube.
Dvorak continues, “2010 will probably be a moribund year for the likes of Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. insofar as PC sales are concerned. And I suspect continued success for Apple Inc. if and when it rolls out a tablet computer which seems to be a giant iPhone of some sort.”
Here are my predicted winners and loser [sic] for the upcoming year:
Winners
• Intel Corp.
• Apple Corp. [sic] “The company is on fire and will continue its hitting streak if the Apple pad computer has the same impact as the iPhone. This winning streak should take the stock close to $300 if not higher.”
• Nintendo Ltd.
• Google Inc.
• ValueClick Inc.
Losers:
• Dell Inc.: “Dell cannot get a break and I cannot see the company righting the ship next year. Its entry into the phone business won’t help since the company has no core competency in this area. It has tried to follow Apple’s lead before with a music player and got nowhere. The company tried to spice up its image buy buying Alienware and could not manage to integrate the operation and let it languish. Its ultra-thin notebook looks great when closed but ridiculous when opened. More recently the acquisition of Perot will tax the management to an extreme as most weird mergers do.”
• Oracle Corp.
• Microsoft Corp.: “Once the bloom is off Windows 7 and the stock tails off I cannot see the company doing much more than squandering its cash reserve while continuing to milk the cash cow. The executive judgment at the top that would have paid Yahoo Inc. $35 or so a share is unsettling. That deal could have broke [sic] the company for good. Other dumb deals lurk to entrap this company.”
• Yahoo
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Microsoft executive judgment” is an oxymoron approaching the level of “Microsoft Works.”
Why MarketWatch pays Dvorak to write articles that someone in junior high could write is beyond me.
I think Kindle sales are BS. Amazon has yet to provide any hard numbers with any of their BS press releases in that POS.
I think I’ve seen a Kindle in the wild. Maybe one.
Dvorak shares my view that the tablet should be referred to as a pad, as in iPad (not to be confused with max-i-pad!)
Oh, wait a minute… That was a Candle in the Wind I saw.
Never seen a Kindle.
Amazon says Kindle e-books outsold paper books this Christmas, implying that all Kindle e-books were sold to Kindle users when the vast majority were sold to iPod touch/iPhone users.
Every trick in the book to make Kindle sales look much better than they are in reality.
Wow…. I actually agreed with the majority of Dvorak’s statements. Looks like 2010 will be a weird one.
Predicting that Apple will do well? Gees, he really went out on a limb with that one.
I think, Amazon is faking the Kindle sales ranking. By making their product the top seller it gets them press and free publicity. If I were in charge of Sony with a competing e-book reader I’d be screaming fraud and unfair competition until Amazon was forced to become transparent on the real Kindle sales numbers. By Amazon claiming the Kindle was the #1 selling electronic device on Amazon and then not providing transparent data to backup it’s claim, Amazon is basically doing the same thing cereal makers do when they claim that a cereal is heart health because it’s made of whole grain and then forget about the fact the cereal contains 5 times the recommended sugars, 9 times the recommended salt and 24 times the recommended fats for a breakfast cereal. Tastes good, but is not really heart healthy or a dietary winner either. Lier, lier pants on fire!! Jeff.
I have friends, colleagues and wife who are Apple shareholders, Mac users but use Kindles too. The common denominator is that they travel extensively. One carries about 20 book titles per trip.
It can’t be a coincidence that “Kindle” rhymes with “swindle”. I also call BS on Amazon’s Kindle claims.
i’ve been surprised by the number of Kindles i’ve seen—it’s averaging about 2 a month. i’m on the east coast and take the bus and subway to and from work, so that’s a pretty wide pool to sample from.
at any rate, i’d welcome to ability to read a text book and use a workbook. i do so now with my phone and the kindle app, but it’s definitely less than ideal. at least while i’m back in school i’d want an Apple tablet, and can see why others may want a Kindle.
The problem with Amazon’s sales ranking is two-fold:
1) The Kindle can *only* be bought on Amazon and nowhere else in the world. All the other electronics (including iPods) are so at tens of thousands of retail outlets and hundreds of other web stores, so sales are split between many vendors. That makes it seem as though the Kindle was hot stuff, but compared to just about anything else, it is would be selling in handful amounts of spread among a much of vendors.
2) Things like iPods are given different product numbers for every model, even color differences. Thus it’s less likely a single model will outsell Kindles, though if you gathered all the iPods together Apple’s selling far more than the Kindle.
@Lucky Dog:
Only 20 books? I have ten times that many on my iPhone!
I looked up “Bandwagon Jumper” in the dictionary, and there was a picture of John C. Dvorak.
Ooooh, an opinion from John Dvorak.
Sadly, our corpulent (not that I’m in a position to talk) Hawaiian shirt wearing hit-whore friend has written too much utter baloney in the past for me to take him or his day-to-day opinions seriously.
And please don’t use the “broken clock being right twice a day” thing at me: that’s not skill or intelligence, that’s luck (or a badly maintained clock).
He was a fsckwit in 2008, he’s been a fsckwit for most of this year and he’ll still be a fsckwit tomorrow.
The only point I disagree with would be Oracle. I may be wrong or simply wishing but… As a DBA for a mid-range IT firm in Halifax Nova Scotia, I see Oracle having a major impact on the database sector in the coming years.
With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle now controls the top choice high end enterprise/business RDBMS and Sun’s MySQL, along with ZFS, Java, and Solaris Oracle has more guns at it’s disposal to turn the company around for the better.
Just my .02 cents
Cheers,
Dvorak is correct? Weird, this coming from the same person who said iphone would be a “dud”.
I guess the windbag smells the writing on his ass..
Apple has not announced that it is introducing ANY product in January, be it a tablet, a pill, a slate, or a paving stone. It’s all rumors.
If they aren’t planning on introducing a tablet, they’d better whip one up in a hurry, or they are doomed!
I bet they are relieved that there are no rumors that they are going to terraform Mars.
Dang!
Dvorak says Apple will do well in 2011… sell your stock fast, this guy is always wrong.
Sad day when conventional dumbdom is taken seriously!
It’s so obvious that even a bloviating dinosaur like Dvorak couldn’t be wrong.
Dvorak Can Suck It! Too late A**Hole
Dvorak is a seriel dumbass and moron only exceeded by that clueless bitch Pelosi. He is accidentally right this time about ‘Apple Corp’.
He’s still a whore, and I refuse to click on his link. Apple’s flourished despite all of his predictions and advice – he simply has no idea what he’s talking about. He should retire.
Dvorak’s next gig will be weather forecasting.
He will predict that the winter will be cold, and that the summer will be hot.