The Analysts

The analysts and fund managers are at it again. They just can't stand good news. Apple is selling iPhones by the swillion and the "financial professionals" are just certain that there's a sasquatch behind the rose bush.

"Lookit," they'll say, "Whaddabout the Prada huh? What about that? And that Linux thing nobody can remember the name of. What if Sony makes a phone? Huh? Or Microsoft?"

Hey guys. Listen up. The Prada is as close an anyone is to the iPhone, and it looks like butt. The rest of those phones are imaginary. The Linux phone? Puh-leeze. There's no such thing as a functional open source business model. Communism sounds great in theory, but it doesn't pay the bills very well. By the time anyone manages to make a reasonable knock-off of the original iPhone, Rush Limbaugh's first iPhone will be in the Smithsonian.

Pretty soon the knock-offs will come. They always have. Remember Windows 95? It looked like a pretty good stab at Macintosh '85. It was a little rough around the edges, but cut Microsoft some slack. They only had 10 years to perfect it. Windows XP? It was supposed to approximate OS X. XP was named accidentally from an emoticon in internal emails. People would send emails that said, "Have you seen the new Windows XP?" Eventually it just stuck.

Apple is not afraid of Microsoft when it comes to innovating. Simply because Apple actually has some experience at it.

Everybody, including Microsoft, will try to copy the superfluous parts of the iPhone's interface; touch screen; cute icons. Some companies may try to include a few items of actual functionality, like visual voicemail. Then they'll add a bunch of ginchy crapware that looks bad, runs worse, and serves no valuable purpose, like a crippled mobile version of GIMP.

Of course, by then, iPhone 3.0 will be on the street.

Stevie Eats World.

Another round over here, please.

Updates
Mac: Same.
iPod: Same.
Zune: Sucks. (brown, red, pink, black, white)
Vista: Sucks.
Apple TV: Haven't heard anything new.