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March 29, 2007

speculation

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye

Posted Mar. 29, ’07, 7:29 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Apple » Speculation

John C. Dvorak Few people can make less sense than John C. Dvorak (yOu know who does). We’ve been good, resisting his irrepressible flamebait. Today I must break my silence because his latest column for MarketWatch made me spit chocolate milk out my nose I laughed so hard.

It’s the loyalists who keep promoting [the iPhone] as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market. And it’s exactly the crowded-market aspect of this that analysts seem to be ignoring.

Or it could just be a really cool phone. Then again, the iPod’s success couldn’t possibly be pulled off again.

First the MP3 player business was segmented and unfocused with numerous players making a lot of cheap junk and not doing much to market any of it. Apple does what? Advertise. Gosh, what a concept.

This is hard hitting analysis people. If I knew analyst was another language for “make stuff up and offer naive explanations of complex situations”, I wouldn’t have studied computer science. I missed the boat with gems, such as the one I will close with.

What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures. It should do that immediately before it’s too late. Samsung Electronics Ltd. might be a candidate. Otherwise I’d advise you to cover your eyes. You’re not going to like what you’ll see.

You know, like John throwing a hissy fit a couple years down the road with the iPhone really is as popular as everything on the Ouija board indicates.


5 Comments

Walt Basil said:

You think he would learn his lesson from multiple past mistakes. Oh well. It will give us all another article to write. My dad claims that the true definition of insane is "doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results."

March 29, 2007 8:09 AM
Mooseboi said:

What's with the Beatles reference? Am I missing something? Are you the Walrus?

March 29, 2007 11:43 AM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

I wonder if the people at MarketWatch know Dvorak writes crap like this... at least it brings them the traffic and the angry emails. Having listened to TWiT, I like Dvorak. He knows what is writes will insult Apple fans.

March 29, 2007 1:55 PM
Jack said:

How did Dvoak turn from being a pundit who is always wrong into a job as professional flamebaiter? He does it well. He wrote a PC mag article making fun of Vista, then a couple weeks later on his video podcast predicted that Vista would become the new in thing and make apple look uncool. You can't make this stuff up. Only John can.

March 29, 2007 3:01 PM
Troy said:

Damn! And I just posted the following comment to the "Apple TV not hacked" news:

[...] including some choice words from one of our favorite incendiary ZDNet bloggers (who we now refuse to link on principle—you know who I mean) [...]

Excellent! If other web pages did this too, these trolls would be deprived of hundreds of thousands of page hits from infuriated Mac users and would have to start writing actual articles for a change to keep their jobs.

Seriously, people like Dvorak, Ou, and Enderle need to completely ignored. They write inflammatory stuff that they know is untrue just to get a boat load of page hits from the Mac community. Dvorak even admitted this on tape (link that is strangely not underlined).

March 30, 2007 10:29 AM

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