Poor Steve Jobs. First he apologizes for dropping the price of the iPhone from $599 to $399 after just 10 weeks on the market and offers Apple customers a $100 rebate. Now he's being slapped with a $1 million lawsuit from a New York woman who says Apple violated price discrimination laws when her fancy new phone was suddenly worth $200 less.
What's going on here? Did Mr. Jobs gouge early technology adopters just for a couple extra (billion) bucks? I don't think so. After a long streak of successes, Mr. Jobs and Apple -- whose stock is up more than 20-fold since 2002 -- have collided with two forces stronger than they are: One is the cheap revolution; the other is the global economy. Together they forced Apple to drop the price of the iPhone and offend its geeky customer base.
Some background: The cheap revolution is a first-order effect of Moore's Law. If you don't know Moore's Law by now, you should probably hang it up. But in case the coffee is slow to stir you this morning, here is the short version: Fairchild Semiconductor cofounder (and later Intel cofounder) Gordon Moore formulated his famous law in 1965, six years after Fairchild had invented the silicon chip. Mr. Moore saw that the number of transistors that could be shrunk and baked into a silicon chip of constant size was doubling every year or so. Caltech professor Carver Mead dubbed this exponential trend of transistor density "Moore's Law" and soon everyone agreed that 18 months was the predicted interval of doubling.
For years, if you said Moore's Law, people presumed you were describing a future of ever more powerful computers. The personal computers of 1981, including the Apple II and the IBM PC, were punks by today's standards. They could run only rudimentary spreadsheets and word processing software. But soon, the dark green screens and white type were replaced by graphics during the mid-1980s, first in the Apple Macintosh and later in PCs running successive versions of Microsoft Windows. This was a terrific advance. But software could only evolve at the pace of Moore's Law.
Source: online.wsj.com
Tags: computers | iPhone | lawsuit | macintosh | Microsoft Windows | moore | New York | Phone | price | Revolution | silicon chip | software | Steve Jobs | transistor | violated
No comments:
Post a Comment