So anyway....

It seems there's this guy who said that Apple is in trouble. They've missed their big chance to expand the market share of the Mac. Vista stumbled, and Apple failed to capitalize on the opportunity to fill the breach. Stross. That's his name. I'd go back and read it again to get my facts right, but it isn't worth it. Near as I recall, there's a business professor involved in all of this somewhere, too.

Anyway, according to this business professor, Apple is in deep feces. The only way they can save themselves is to start selling Macs at bazillions of retail outlets – Best Buy, Circuit City, Macy's, J.C. Penney's, Radio Shack, Lowe's, Piggly-Wiggly, Hallmark Shops, UPS Stores, Toys ʁ Us, and 7-11.

So Apple is in trouble here. They have a Market Capitalization of 120.4 billion United States dollars. They sell the four-letter answer to the crossword clue, "portable music player." All the posing you may have heard about the iPhone raising consciousness about smart-phones and benefitting all the handset makers is hogwash. The iPhone only benefits one handset maker: Apple. In a few hours, when Apple announces the European deal for the iPhone, the stock is headed straight up. I'm willing to bet the last beer in the fridge that when Apple releases fourth quarter numbers in a few weeks they have over 20% of the laptop market. Just about then, Leopard will hit the streets. When students at Gonzaga and Boston College and USC running Vista see their friends running Leopard they'll be screaming for Mom and Dad to buy them new MacBooks.

Then in just a couple of months all those Shuffles and Nanos will be stuffed into all those stockings.

Yeah, folks y'got trouble. With a capital "T;" That rhymes with "B;" And that stands for bullshit.

Microsoft and all of the other hardware and software companies are developing independent strategies for competing with Apple, but none of them can do anything about the pieces of the widget they don't build. Let's keep in mind that Vista is getting worse press than Windows '95 ever did. All the boxmakers can do to improve their products is shoehorn in the new Intel or AMD chips and hope like hell Vista will run okay on them.

No other company owns the whole widget. No other computer maker owns an operating system. No other handset maker owns the software upgrade pipeline. No other media player maker owns the bridge to content (unless you count ∅). There is no other phone built for a specific computer/OS combination. There is no other computer/OS combination tuned in to specific phone and media player. Apple has all of that.

Just between us kids, I'd trade my favorite pair of jeans and both cats to be in the kind of trouble Apple is in. (Okay. You caught me. I'd trade both cats for a root canal and an ingrown toenail. But my favorite pair of Levi's 550s is sacrosanct.)

I just love to read the gloom and doom guys. They're all such bozos.

Don't do that. It tickles.