“Here is a test for investors. Where is most of the value added in a computer? If you answered the hardware or assembly, you’re wrong. Most of it comes in the software and the marketing,” Dana Blankenhorn writes for TheStreet. “Controlling the platform is the key to long-term financial success.”
“The move from the PC era with a TV for output, a keyboard and mouse for input, and spinning disks for storage, to the tablet era with a TV for input and output, spinning disks replaced by memory chips and wireless networking, gave Asia a huge opportunity to grab the top of the stack. Asian companies made the parts and assembled the devices. All they needed to do was take control over what they had,” Blankenhorn writes. “The big technology story of 2012 is how America’s computer companies, at some risk to their margins, aren’t letting them.”
Blankenhorn writes, “The story is centered on Apple, whose new CEO, Tim Cook, failed with his ‘new iPad’ launch in March… Cook did two things to bring the value back: 1. He found a new source for the bright “Retina” screen, easily visible on a clear sunny day, through a combination of Japan’s Sharp and Korea’s LG, as 9to5google.com reported; 2. Apple engineers also perfected a new assembly technique, borrowed from aerospace, enabling flat screens to be crisply attached to a flat bank of chips, resulting in a device that’s lighter and thinner than anything that came before.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tim Cook didn’t “fail” with his “new iPad” launch in March; not by any stretch of the imagination.