Apple's Great Mistake

It has occurred to me for some time now that Apple is shooting itself in the foot by going with exclusive deals with carriers. So I thought I would write this down.

Sell AAPL. Unless they open up to all carriers very soon, they are creating a situation where the vacuum in availability for their product amongst the other major carriers is causing those carriers to scramble and throw money and resources at makers of competing products.

Palm would have no chance, no matter how good the current version of the Palm and how good the operating system, against Apple if iPhones were widely available. Palm has had the most buggy and lousy PDA on the market for some 5 years now and this is why they are insignificant player in the market.

RIM has the best product on the market for what it does and they are playing catch up to Apple on consumer applications with the benefit of a large share of the corporate market and very strong presence there. Apple is not taken seriously in this space yet so they are essentially "split market" products.

The Android and other products by LG and Samsung are like always, doing the best they can to copy the real innovators in this space. Having said that, the Korean manufactures are light years ahead of the US companies in technology in many other aspects because they have had 3G for a while now and their smaller countries and dense populations are breeding grounds for testing all kind of advanced applications using high bandwidth while the US is in the 3rd world in many areas of application due to the old regulated monopolies doing everything in their power to resist investment and rake as much cash out of their customers with inferior technology as possible, the American Way, and it always fails.

Mr. William Poole's Comment on Goldman

Funny, the former president of the St. Louis Fed, William Poole, makes comment about Goldman's raking AIG over the coals before their collapse. His comment:

It’s not the responsibility of any private firm to determine what the public interest is -- that’s why we have a government.

Strange when someone who basically resigned because of his interest in Goldman was seen as a complete contradiction to his job "protecting" the financial system, hence the citizenry, would make such a comment.

I have been arguing for years now that the reason the credit markets and the hugely profitable unregulated, opaque derivative markets have not been regulated is because those that have a hand in regulating were just making to much money off the same markets they supposedly regulated to do anything about it. Look at the impotent SEC, Fed, Treasury, Legislative bodies and White House over last 8 years and you get the picture.

Now, for someone who is no longer in their highly powerful and influential position to come out and say, "Hey, I know I was in government when all this was happening and I know we did not do shit about it, but that is tough cause it's nobody else's responsibility either." is kind of a joke.